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Gates of Vienna News Feed 5/9/2014

The news feed is exceptionally large tonight, due to an accumulation of two days’ worth of material. It contains two hundred items, which I believe is a record. Fortunately, a few weeks ago I enlarged the capacity of the software that processes the data for it.

The most notable news item for tonight concerns the decision by Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan to convert the Basilica of Hagia Sophia into a part-time mosque. When Muslims gather there for prayers, the lighting will be arranged so as to keep the Christian frescoes in the dark, thereby avoiding offense to Islamic sensibilities. The occasion will represent the first time the structure has been used as a mosque since Kemal Ataturk converted it into a museum in 1934.

To see the headlines and the articles, click “Continue reading” below.

Notice to tipsters: Please don’t submit extensive excerpts from articles that have been posted behind a subscription firewall, or are otherwise under copyright protection.

Caveat: Articles in the news feed are posted “as is”. Gates of Vienna cannot vouch for the authenticity or accuracy of the contents of any individual item posted here. We check each entry to make sure it is relatively interesting, not patently offensive, and at least superficially plausible. The link to the original is included with each item’s title. Further research and verification are left to the reader.

In the 10-year budget projections it released in April, the CBO estimated that the federal government will run $7.618 trillion in deficits from 2015 through 2024. At the same time, the CBO projected that the federal government’s debt held by the public would rise from $11.983 trillion at the end of fiscal 2013 to $20.947 trillion by the end of 2024.

While much of the world was distracted by the supposed clash over Ukraine between Russian strongman Vladimir Putin and Western politicians, the International Monetary Fund announced a bailout of the new Ukrainian regime denominated in the IMF’s increasingly influential proto-global currency known as Special Drawing Rights, or SDRs. Analysts are warning that the developments could have profound implications for the global monetary system and the economy — and especially for the United States, which is stealthily being set up for economic calamity as the U.S. dollar continues on the road to losing its prized status as the world reserve currency.

The controversial planetary entity and its Western apparatchiks, along with various communist and socialist dictatorships and the United Nations, have long been agitating to ultimately dethrone the embattled U.S. dollar. Top-level American officials at the U.S. Treasury and the Federal Reserve have been helping them along. The dollar’s place as the global reserve currency would be filled by the IMF’s SDR, currently composed of a basket of currencies that includes dollars, British pounds, euros, and Japanese yen. The IMF, the UN, and multiple national governments have all openly advocated precisely such a plot in reports and statements made in recent years. The Obama administration, meanwhile, has exploited the Ukraine crisis to further empower the IMF while reducing U.S. influence.

In bailing out the new Ukrainian government, the IMF announcement of its decision — taken with approval from Russian authorities despite the alleged East-West brouhaha — referred to SDRs on multiple occasions.

(ANSA) — Rome, May 8 — The European Central Bank could cut interest rates next month if economic data show such a move is necessary, ECB President Mario Draghi said Thursday.

“The Governing Council is comfortable with acting next time, but before that we want to see the staff projections that will come out in the early June,” Draghi said at a press conference in Brussels. Meanwhile, the ECB left its benchmark interest rate unchanged at a record low of 0.25%. Draghi also said he is ready to “act quickly” and apply unconventional measures if inflation remains too weak for too long.

The central bank is monitoring developments in inflation “very closely” and the ECB’s governing council is agreed on the value of using unusual tools if required. While the bank has not been explicit about what unconventional measures it might consider, in other major countries these have translated into buying government assets to help control interest rates and encourage economic growth.

The United States Federal Reserve calls the measures quantitative easing (QE), which has also been used by the Bank of Japan and the Bank of England.

An upcoming surveillance hub monitoring all investment transactions in real-time will allow the National Security Agency unparalleled ability to manipulate the stock market.

Through the use of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA)’s latest database, which keeps investor data in the same centralized location, the NSA could easily capture private, financial data on targeted investors and even influence the stock market as a whole.

And it appears that the dragnet database, called the Comprehensive Automated Risk Data System (CARDS), was designed with such vulnerabilities in mind.

The marriage rate in the United States has fallen to the lowest level ever recorded. So why is this happening? Well, the truth is that there are a lot of reasons why so many young people are choosing not to get married today. One big reason is money.

Young adults in the U.S. are really struggling to find good jobs, and many are hesitant to take a big step like marriage without achieving a certain level of financial security first. And as you will see below, many young adults (especially women) do not even want to date someone that is not employed. In this harsh economic environment, money makes a big difference in the world of romance. Another big reason for the decline of marriage in America is a seismic shift in cultural attitudes. Americans (especially young people) do not place the same kind of importance on marriage and having children that they once did. Instead, more Americans are choosing to “move in together” than ever before. But if the percentage of Americans that choose to get married continues to decline, what is that going to mean for our future, and what is our country going to look like moving forward?…

Unfortunately for American men, there simply are not enough good jobs to go around. In fact, the number of working age Americans without a job has increased by 27 million since the year 2000, and businesses in the U.S. are being destroyed faster than they are being created.

Due to a lack of economic opportunities, a rising percentage of our young people have been giving up on the “real world” and have been moving back in with Mom and Dad.

The automatic spending cuts known as “sequestration” took effect last year, an idea first proposed by the Obama White House (and subsequently supported by Republicans), and signed into law as part of the Budget Control Act of 2011. The idea behind sequestration was to temporarily raise the debt ceiling in exchange for automatic spending cuts that would only be triggered if — and only if — Congress’ “Super Committee” didn’t come up with a solution to reduce the nation’s long-term deficit.

As it turns out, the spending cuts did take effect, and despite incessant warnings from administration officials that sequestration would lead to massive layoffs, almost every single government worker kept his or her job. In fact, according to the Government Accountability Office, sequestration resulted in just one layoff in FY 2013. Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) released the following statement:

The International Monetary Fund has approved a US$17 billion loan to Ukraine. The first $3.2 billion tranche arrived on Wednesday.

It’s essential to identify the conditions attached to this Mafia-style “loan”. Nothing remotely similar to reviving the Ukrainian economy is in play. The scheme is inextricably linked to the IMF’s notorious, one-size-fits-all “structural adjustment” policy, known to hundreds of millions from Latin America and Southeast Asia to Southern Europe.

The regime changers in Kiev have duly complied, launching the inevitable austerity package — from tax hikes and frozen pensions to a stiff, over 50 percent rise on the price of natural gas heating Ukrainian homes. The “Ukrainian people” won’t be able to pay their utility bills this coming winter.

Predictably, the massive loan is not for the benefit of “the Ukrainian people.” Kiev is essentially bankrupt. Creditors range from Western banks to Gazprom — which is owed no less than $2.7 billion. The “loan” will pay back these creditors; not to mention that $5 billion of the total is earmarked for payments of — what else — previous IMF loans. It goes without saying that a lot of the funds will be duly pocketed — Afghanistan-style — by the current bunch of oligarchs aligned with the “Yats” government in Kiev.

The House Judiciary Committee voted 32-0 to advance legislation that would put a halt to the National Security Agency’s controversial bulk collection of internet and telephone records, exposed last year by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Amendments to the USA Freedom Act aim to block the NSA’s ability to siphon and store the so-called metadata on domestic and international communications, instead keeping the information in the hands of telephone and internet companies.

Under the provisions of the bill, the NSA would be required to prove to the courts that an individual is somehow connected with terrorism before it could gain access to their personal information.

The bill reflects recommendations forwarded last year by a presidential Review Group that advised the NSA to stop pressuring tech companies to put “back doors” into their programs, which gives the NSA unfettered access to customers’ records.

Following police and media reports that Jack in the Box employees at a Fort Worth store hid in the freezer following a visit by a group of open-carry protesters, Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America started a petition urging the burger chain’s leadership to enforce its ban on firearms at corporate-owned stores.

Hatem Bazian—a senior lecturer in the department of Near Eastern studies, director of the Islamophobia Research & Documentation Project at the University of California, Berkeley, and a regular at Sabeel conferences and other “interfaith” events—led the workshop titled “American Muslims and the Palestinian struggle for liberation.” It focused on the alleged connection between “Islamophobia,” counterterrorism, and the pro-Israel movement.

“Live free or die” is the motto of the state of New Hampshire. I hope the residents are prepared to die, because living free is not what they do.

NH is merely a cog within the Amerikan Stasi State, but I am referring to what goes on within NH itself, not the police state existence imposed by Washington. On May 5 attorney William Baer was arrested at a school board meeting at which he went over a 2-minute speaking rule while trying to get some explanation from the Gilford, NH, school board for assigning sexually explicit reading material to his 14-year old daughter’s English class. The evasiveness of the school board angered Mr. Baer, and he spoke out again in support of another parents protests, and was promptly arrested by a goon thug cop. (www.dailypaul.com/318393/fox-news-to-interview-william-baer-father-arrested-in-new-hampshire-for-going-over-two-minute-rule-in-school-board-meetin)

The school board chairman, Sue Allen, who has no legislative power nevertheless managed to create a law backed by police violence. After all if Bush and Obama can create laws by edict, why not a school board chairman? Under Allen’s edict, if a parent violates the 2-minute rule that Allen imposed, she has the parent arrested. The goon thug cop wasn’t embarrassed to arrest a parent for making a legitimate complaint during the public comment period of a school board meeting.

This is Amerika today. Mr Baer offered no resistance, but nevertheless was lucky that the goon thug cop did not taser him, pepper spray him, and call for a backup SWAT team to beat him senseless or even murder him.

Last month wedding guests at at the San Luis Hotel in Galveston, Texas, were set upon without reason by 34 crazed goon thug cops. The guests, including the father of the bride and the bride’s brother were brutally beaten and maced along with many guests including 13 who were arrested for asking, “what is going on?” The brother was so badly injured by the goon thugs that he had to be rushed via helicopter to a hospital.

The mayhem resulted from an off-duty goon thug witnessing a guest walk outside with an alcoholic beverage, thus violating the city’s “open container” law. Instead of advising the guest of the open container law and recommending that he step back inside, the goon thug called the cops who arrived on the scene in mass and enjoyed themselves by beating up the wedding party. (www.policestateusa.com/2014/galveston-wedding-beatdown/)

Reality in the Golden State tells a far different story from climate modeling predictions.

Back in February, there was a public dust-up between the Obama administration and the climate science community. Obama blamed the current California drought on climate change — let’s be precise, on anthropogenic climate change — while the climate scientists generally pushed back and said California’s current drought is likely due to natural climate variability.

Kelly was a passenger in the truck stopped by the cops, asleep at the time when the driver was pulled over and arrested for being under the influence of alcohol.

The video taken from the police dashcam shows Kelly struggling inside the truck and getting caught up in the seat belt as the Highway Patrol Trooper attempts to wake him up.

The Sheriff’s deputy then rushes to the passenger side of the vehicle with a taser drawn. After failing to pull Kelly completely from the vehicle, and leaving him still tangled in the seatbelt, half way out of the truck, the deputy fired the taser which struck Kelly directly in the eye.

The deputy is heard yelling “Get on the ground, get on the ground, now, get on the ground, I’ll do it again, get on the ground.”

With his hands on his head and clearly disorientated, Kelly received another jolt from the taser directly into his eye. The cops then managed to free Kelly from the seatbelt.

The video shows Kelly telling the cops “My eye hurts,” as it becomes swollen shut. Paramedics who later tended to Kelly said that he suffered “near total loss of vision.”

Editor’s Note: If you’ve ever spent some time reading Karl Denninger’s Market Ticker you’ve come to realize that he is a straight-shooter of the highest order. Whether commenting on geo-politics, the economy, corruption or the persistent destruction of our liberties, Denninger doesn’t mince words. His arguments are not only logical in a world plagued by irrationality, but backed up with solid data.

In the following article Denninger details the lies, half-truths and coverups surrounding America’s gun debate and the war on drugs. As it relates to gun control, our government and the politicians running it often cite manipulated statistics in order to push forward their agenda. The goal is to disarm America’s tens of millions of law abiding citizens of their right to bear arms. But as is often the case, Denninger blows their entire argument to smithereens with real facts, showing that the violent crime statistics often used to justify the actions of gun control proponents are created by their very own actions and policies.

This is a set up and most Americans, especially those who subscribe to the notion that government is trying to make everything better, haven’t a clue that they’re being indoctrinated by the very people who have caused the problem.

American scientists have for the first time ever made it possible for an organism to survive with artificial DNA, making it more likely new medicines can be developed, while raising ethical concerns among some advocates.

For researchers at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California the breakthrough, published Wednesday in the Nature science journal, was 15 years in the making.

(NaturalNews) A court case out of Edwardsville, IL, alleges that Dr. Abid O. Nisar obtained illegal, unapproved pharmaceutical drugs from Turkey and used them on a woman he falsely diagnosed as having “pre leukemia.”

The patient, Rosemarie Wendler, is suing Dr. Nisar for falsely diagnosing her with ‘pre-leukemia’ while treating her with smuggled drugs from Turkey.

Alleged enforcers for a Mexican cartel were reportedly involved in the kidnapping and torture of U.S. teenagers over methamphetamine in St. Paul, Minnesota, according to the local St. Paul Pioneer Press. The U.S. Attorney’s office omitted Mexican cartel involvement in their official press release on the case. The official press release was titled, “Four Indicted for Drug Trafficking Crimes Involving a Violent Kidnapping in St. Paul” and only identified the perpetrators as being from U.S. cities. There were no mentions of Mexico, cartels, or even a transnational criminal organization—the DOJ agency simply omitted the vital information amid national discussions of immigration reform and debates regarding the importance of border security.

Another press release from the U.S. Attorney’s office in Washington State was headlined, “Southwest Washington Man Who Operated Shingle Mill as Cover for Drug Dealing Gets 10-Year Prison Term.” Once again, after further research, Breitbart News discovered that the “Southwest Washington man” was actually a Mexican national and the U.S. Attorney’s office went on record and finally admitted that the man was working for a Mexican cartel—though they omitted this vital detail in their initial public statement on the case.

Border Security Expert Sylvia Longmire stated, “This kind of cartel violence happens across America much more often than we are led to believe—in Las Vegas, outside Atlanta and northern Alabama are just a few examples. Not only are we led to believe that our borders are safer and more secure than at any time in history, but the level and frequency of violent Mexican cartel activity across the US is repeatedly downplayed or relegated to local media reports that never see the national light of day.” Longmire added, “Department of Homeland Security officials have stated in congressional testimony that they don’t keep track of cartel violence in the US, which allows them plausible deniability of its existence. If America saw this story and so many others like it played out on major TV networks during even one news cycle, they would be horrified, and rightly so. This is probably what the DOJ and DHS are trying to prevent: citizens learning the truth about the real reach of Mexican cartels into our nation’s heartland.”

A Las Vegas news station reported on Thursday the Federal Bureau of Investigation has launched an investigation into rancher Cliven Bundy and his supporters following the April 12 standoff with heavily armed agents of the federal Bureau of Land Management.

“The I-Team has confirmed that FBI agents have launched a formal investigation into alleged death threats, intimidation and possible weapons violations,” KLAS-TV reported.

Police said “they feared for their lives that day because of the assembled firepower, and because many in the crowd had pointed weapons at officers, taunted them, told them they should be ready to die.”

Assistant Sheriff Joe Lombardo told KLAS-TV “federal authorities are conducting an investigation and I am pretty confident it is going to go into the future.” He said “there is definitely going to be consequences” for Bundy supporters who responded to the BLM presence by carrying firearms.

The federal government may soon try to use election laws to stifle the freedom of the press and online dissent from purveyors of so-called “right-wing” news, the chairman of the Federal Election Commission has warned.

In an interview with the Washington Examiner, FEC Chairman Lee. E. Goodman said that government officials are feeling pressured to align their interests with those of “conservative publishers,” eroding the “left’s media monopoly.”

“I think there are impulses in the government every day to second guess and look into the editorial decisions of conservative publishers,” Goodman told Examiner editor Paul Bedard.

The Defense Of Liberty Has Come Down To States, County Sheriffs, And We The People

America’s founders, largely distrustful of centralized power, created several checks and balances into the U.S. Constitution to help insure that one person, or one group of people, would not be able to unilaterally exert his or their will over the American citizenry. First, the federal government itself was divided into three separate and distinct branches — each holding the capability (and responsibility) to check the power of the other. Second, the Bill of Rights was made part of the Constitution for the protection of individual liberties. Third, the “free and independent states” of the nation retained their sovereignty and independence after the central government was created (by the states), with the Tenth Amendment specifically recognizing their authority and jurisdiction over matters not directly delegated to the federal government.

It was also assumed that the freedom of the press and the freedom of religion would help the citizenry be sufficiently informed and inspired to keep the would-be despots at bay…

[…]

What has become increasingly obvious to a large segment of the American populace is the complete unwillingness of the national media to hold the federal government accountable. Neither do America’s pulpits provide the moral leadership necessary to maintain good government. The freedom of the press and religion accomplish precious little today in the safeguarding of liberty. And it is also absolutely clear that the three branches of government in Washington, D.C., adamantly refuse to use the constitutional obligations placed upon them to hold the federal government in check.

The latter was made crystal clear by a recent decision by the Supreme Court of the United States. Here is the report:

“A decision by the U.S. Supreme Court means the federal government now has an open door to ‘detain as a threat to national security anyone viewed as a troublemaker,’ according to critics.

I received a call from Brannon Howse, asking me to listen to several video clips of Glenn Beck speaking at this year’s final convocation at Liberty University and to give him my take on them.

First, it exceeds my capacity to understand how one of the great Christian universities with a steadfast commitment of “Training Champions for Christ” could invite an elite cultist to stand before its entire student body and give them spiritual instructions for life.

Is it that, as educated as they seem, they just don’t know that Mormons worship an exalted man/god, serve a different Christ, offer a different salvation, stand on the foundation of false prophets and seek to earn their own godhoods?…

Before I turn this into a 40 page thesis, let me go into several specific Mormon zingers that Beck dropped in the midst of his message that need to be addressed

Beck talked about what a great man Joseph Smith was. He talked about his dying a martyr for Christ, dying for his faith. He said Smith was an honest man; so honest he gave his pocket watch to pay a sheriff for a debt he didn’t owe. Beck failed to explain how he now had Smith’s watch.

He also ignored the historical fact that Smith wasn’t quite as innocent as Beck claimed. He was in jail for leading his militia into town and destroying a newspaper press and burning the place down. He didn’t like what the paper had said about his many, well known adulteries.

It was probably his thirteenth run in with the law. Earlier charges included bank fraud, glass-looking , treason, conspiracy to commit murder, fornication and adultery.

New York City is the epitome of PC liberal insanity. Due to decades of revulsion in response to the fact individuals are responsible for their own self defense and an illogical fear of firearms, thousands of people have suffered and many have died at the hands of psychopaths and violent criminals.

Criminals know they have nothing to fear. They know the vast majority of New Yorkers are unarmed and helpless. The police long ago admitted it is not their responsibility to protect the public. Police exist in New York and other large cities primarily to generate revenue for the state.

The latest incident demonstrating you have to be insane to live in New York occurred the other day in the Rockaway Avenue and Fulton Street A and C train station in Bedford-Stuyvesant.

The relentless efforts by Wisconsin leftists to undermine Gov. Scott Walker and his fellow conservatives — by any means necessary — has taken another hit. In a 26-page decision, U.S. District Judge Rudolph Randa granted a preliminary injunction halting a politically-motivated John Doe investigation that probed campaign spending and fundraising by Gov. Scott Walker’s campaign, Eric O’Keefe, his Wisconsin Club for Growth (WCFG), and other conservative entities. “The Defendants must cease all activities related to the investigation, return all property seized in the investigation from any individual or organization, and permanently destroy all copies of information and other materials obtained through the investigation,” Randa wrote.

Randa illuminated his contempt for the investigation. “The defendants are pursuing criminal charges through a secret John Doe investigation against the plaintiffs for exercising issue advocacy speech rights that on their face are not subject to the regulations or statutes the defendants seek to enforce. This legitimate exercise of O’Keefe’s rights as an individual, and WCFG’s rights as a 501(c)(4) corporation, to speak on the issues has been characterized by the defendants as political activity covered by Chapter 11 of the Wisconsin Statutes, rendering the plaintiffs a subcommittee of the Friends of Scott Walker (FOSW) and requiring that money spent on such speech be reported as an in-kind campaign contribution. This interpretation is simply wrong.”

As a result, Randa ordered that the plaintiffs “and others” are “hereby relieved of any and every duty under Wisconsin law to cooperate further with Defendants’ investigation. Any attempt to obtain compliance by any Defendant or John Doe Judge Gregory Peterson is grounds for a contempt finding by this Court.”

Nothing we don’t know already, except the percentage of reporters who call themselves Republican is a lot smaller than I thought it might be. Ten years ago, 18% of reporters identified as Republicans compared to 7% today.

A 17-year-old was killed after a confounding police encounter during which the cops slammed him on the ground, shattered his ribs, pepper-sprayed him and shoved a sharp object down his throat, according to his family’s lawsuit.

The teen, whose first name is not given in the lawsuit, allegedly died at the hands of Huntsville, Alabama, police during an attempted drug bust. His mother, Nancy Smith, filed the lawsuit.

Smith was set up in a drug sting operation facilitated by a police informant. Officers approached Smith during the drug deal, and he ran. The officers were not dressed as cops and did not announce themselves as such.

A new bill being circulated for co-sponsors in Delaware would make any person in possession of a firearm that is undetectable by a metal detector a felon.

The bill, which has not been posted online, was leaked by State Rep. Jeffery Spiegelman (R) via a phone picture.

Posted from thetruthaboutguns.com, Spiegelman writes, “First, let me apologize for the poor quality. This bill (137) was circulated today for cosponsors and I only had a couple of seconds to take a picture of it with my cell phone. In other words, it is not even online for public viewing yet. Here are my initial thoughts…

Senator John McCain told a radio show recently that Americans should “accept” the notion that their private conversations are being recorded by the government, even in the privacy of their own homes…

Though McCain denied that the NSA was listening to every telephone conversation in America, as former NSA employee turned whistleblower William Binney has emphasized on multiple occasions, the space required to store mere metadata and not actual content of conversations is minimal.

The reason the NSA is building huge data centers which cover 1.5 million square feet, like the facility in Bluffdale, Utah, is because the agency is storing actual content of phone calls, online chats and conversations.

Instead of accepting their losses in the courts and ballot boxes, opponents of gun rights continue to come up with schemes to disarm Americans.

“It is not even possible to consistently and legibly imprint on the cartridge primer the required identifying information from the tip of the firing pin, the only conceivable location for such micro-laser engraving,” he said. Microstamping purports to laser-engrave information, such as a gun’s make, model and serial number on two distinct parts of each handgun, including the firing pin so that, in theory, this information would be imprinted on the cartridge casing when the pistol is fired.

The process adds up to $200 to the cost of the firearm, which makes it a perfect vehicle for backdoor gun control, literally pricing an entire price-point class of consumers out of the right to keep and bear arms.

With courts consistently ruling in favor of gun rights, in light of the Second Amendment’s clear language, liberals are looking for ways to restrict gun rights through taxes, regulations and administrative burdens, which have the same net effect of straight-forward gun control…

The state of New York has experimented with microstamping schemes for more than 10 years and in that time not a single crime has been solved using the method.

Outside of the Empire State, there are few crime labs equipped or set up to work with microstamping, since the technology has proved virtually worthless for law enforcement investigations.

If you want to get some idea of the moral bankruptcy of our educational system, read an article in the May 4th issue of the New York Times Magazine titled, “The Tale of Two Schools.”

The article is not about moral bankruptcy. But it is itself an example of the moral bankruptcy behind the many failures of American education today.

Someone had the bright idea of pairing public high school kids from a low-income neighborhood in the Bronx with kids from a private high school that charges $43,000 a year.

When the low-income youngsters visited the posh private school, “they were just overwhelmed” by it, according to the New York Times. “One kid ran crying off campus.” Apparently others felt “so disheartened about their own circumstances.”

What earthly good did that do for these young people? Thank heaven no one was calloused enough to take me on a tour of a posh private school when I was growing up in Harlem.

Earlier today when we posted on Hollywood’s ‘sudden awareness’ about Sharia,, we noted the comments from last nights Fox News The Kelly File about former Secretary of State Clinton contesting requests from the CIA, FBI, National Counterterrorism Center to designate Nigerian Jihadist group, Boko Haram, “a foreign terrorist organization”. Nina Shea, noted human rights lawyer and, director of the Washington, DC -based Center for Religious Freedom of the Hudson Institute, who we also positively cited in our post, revealed in a National Review On-line post, just how delusional the State Department was under Clinton’s leadership on this issue. Our take, Clinton was reflecting the Administration’s obsessive redaction of any reference to Islamic doctrine as the wind behind the sails of this murderous band of terrorists. Secretary Clinton held hearings in December 2011 with representatives of the EU, OSCE and members of the Saudi-based Organization for Islamic Cooperation. They were endeavoring to prefect implementation of the UN Human Rights Council Res. 16/18 on Combating religious Intolerrance — a thinly disguised version of a global Sharia Blasphemy code. Shea, whose interview is included in our collection, The West Speaks, was present at those State Department Instabul Process proceedings. In our post on that State Department conference, Shea called it ‘perverse”. In response to her New York Post op ed on those State Department proceedings we wrote:

A nine-year-old Portland girl was handcuffed and arrested after engaging in a small feud with another girl. She was treated like a criminal and even detained at a police station.

The incident, which took place a year ago at a Boys & Girls club, is garnering renewed interest now that the girl’s mother has come forward to share her dissatisfaction with the police review of the case.

Further evidence that our college system has been taken over by radical Marxist professors is given by this horrific story out of the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Otis Madison allegedly told students that were “Ted Cruz-supporting ‘teabaggers’ to get the hell out of his classroom before he sent them home to their mother in a body bag,” as reported in The College Fix.

Student Alice Gilbert, a conservative, enrolled in the class entitled “The Obama Phenomenon,” to broaden her horizons and learn more about Obama, hoping to gain a different perspective, but immediately dropped the class after Professor Madison opened his class with the hateful and potential threatening remarks.

(NaturalNews) The White House alarmism over global warming / climate change / “climate disruption” would be a lot more believable if it weren’t so contrived. Of all the legitimate, imminent threats facing the continuity of the American way of life with its cheap money, cheap imports, cheap electricity, cheap fuel and cheap food, the Obama Administration selectively chooses to acknowledge none of them. The only one you’re supposed to notice is “climate disruption,” a loony new reframe of reality that absurdly tries to convince you planet Earth never experienced droughts, floods, hurricanes and tornados before the industrial revolution.

The climate never changed, we are now being told, until we all started burning fossil fuels. This idea contradicts the entire known geological and climate history of our planet, of course, but that never got in the way of a political ramrod attempt.

On the far more urgent issue of an EMP attack which could cripple the U.S. power grid and kill 90% of all Americans (1), the White House is utterly silent. Never mind the fact that Russia and China could launch an EMP attack right now, and that North Korea’s capability to do such a thing is only a few short years away. Never mind the fact that in a grid down scenario, every U.S. city would be immediately transformed into a death zone. The White House wants you to be terrified of carbon dioxide, a plant nutrient that actually accelerates reforestation and boosts crop yields globally…

If you buy into the mass climate hypnosis being rammed into the minds of Americans today, you and I are supposed to worry about melting ice caps but not the fact that the U.S. debt has doubled to over $17 trillion in just the last two presidential terms. We’re supposed to be terrified of hurricanes but not give a second thought to the fact that 92 million Americans are now out of work and almost totally dependent on government handouts for their survival. (3) (The official government unemployment figure, which nobody believes, is 6.3%)

Cops penetrate churches and turn them into snitch operations for the national security state

The Hanover County, Virginia, Sheriff has rolled out a surveillance and snitch program based inside local churches.

The mission of the program, according to a post on the Hanover County web page, is to “reduce crime and the fear of crime in houses of worship and areas frequented by the faith community as well as provide for emergency preparedness partnership initiatives. We provide education and partnership opportunities to our faith community in an effort to recognize crime risks, train them to accurately report crimes, and be better prepared in the event of an emergency.”…

According to Pastor and former presidential candidate Chuck Baldwin, the national security state has exploited the IRS’ 501CS non-profit tax status to undermine churches in the United States.

Moreover, many Christian churches readily cite Romans chapter 13 “that teaches Christians are obligated to submit to government regardless of whether government acts within the confines and jurisdiction of God’s law or not,” Baldwin writes. “In reality, the American church today, on the whole, is not even a church. It is a government corporation whose loyalty is offered first to Caesar, not to Christ, and whose message is first politically correct before it is Biblically correct.”

When protecting your children becomes a crime against the state in New Hampshire

“I was arrested.”

It took a minute for me to wrap my mind around those words, uttered by a one of the most decent men I know. He is an attorney by profession, having worked in the prosecutor’s office within the Five Boroughs of New York City.

He’s dealt with some of the most unsavory people and unspeakable crimes of our nation in that capacity. More importantly, however, he is a proud and protective family man. He’s a loving husband and a proud father of two children, including Marina Baer, a ninth grader in the Gilford, New Hampshire School District.

My mind raced as I fired questions at him with mind numbing rapidity. “Where, What for? What happened?” I prodded. He answered each question calmly and methodically, combining his replies with an extremely important “back-story” that will probably not be reported anywhere by the mainstream media…

The critical back-story, then, indicates that the school board not just anticipated Mr. Baer’s attendance, but took very precise steps to make certain that his objections would be muted and otherwise dealt with in a manner that has been inconsistent with previous public meetings. It would appear that dissent about the book as an assignment in an ninth grade honors class was not merely expected, but the response to such dissent was decided in advance.

Today a photography blog unearthed another strange development in America’s ongoing patent train wreck: Amazon was recently awarded the intellectual rights to taking pictures of people in front of seamless white backgrounds.

Critics of the deal from the tech and photography worlds are split on what they see as the bigger affront: the gullibility of the US Patent and Trade Office, or the genius of Amazon’s patent lawyers.

The patent, which you can read here, was originally filed in 2011, and has the fittingly sparse title, “Studio Arrangement.” It takes five pages of dense text to explain the photographic innovation at issue. There is a diagram that, TechDirt points out, “pretty much looks like every photo studio in the history of photo studios.”

The Amazon technique is illustrated in their patent filing with this flowchart:

Cruz’s “The Legal Limit Report No. 4,” obtained by The Daily Caller, delves into little-known and little-reported details of President Obama’s executive actions. Cruz was set to discuss his report at the Federalist Society in the Promenade Ballroom of the Mayflower Hotel in Washington at 2:15 PM Wednesday.

“Of all the troubling aspects of the Obama presidency, none is more dangerous than the President’s persistent pattern of lawlessness, his willingness to disregard the written law and instead enforce his own policies via executive fiat,” Cruz stated in the report’s introductory remarks.

The neo-Stalinists and Hugo Chavez wannabes of the American Left — in a word, Democrats — are always looking for new ways to take away our freedom. They hunt Lady Liberty like Captain Ahab hunted the white whale.

Two of their latest efforts surfaced in the news last week.

In Congress, a pair of Democrats, Sen. Edward Markey of Massachusetts and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York, are pushing a bill, S.2219, that would authorize a government agency to monitor all “telecommunications” for “hate speech” that might could, maybe, just possibly inspire violent crimes motivated by “hate” — except, of course, for games of “knockout.” Democrats really hate hate, and they’ll destroy anyone who hates. Unless they hate those whom Democrats hate.

By “telecommunications” they mean any and all forms of communication more sophisticated than passing notes or muttering out of the corner of your mouth to the woman behind you on the checkout line. But they do want to monitor radio and TV broadcasts, Internet websites and blogs, Facebook pages, “commercial mobile services, and other electronic media” — meaning our email messages and cell phone conversations — for “hate speech.”

[…]

The Left is for radically transforming America into a country in which any opinion but theirs is systematically repressed. They call that “diversity.” To root out and abolish any opinion but their own, they call “tolerance.” To impoverish and criminalize anyone who dares to differ with them, they call “justice.”

Megaplants like Agua Caliente in Arizona herald a new efficiency in solar-sourced electricity

The plant comprises more than five million solar panels that span the equivalent of two Central Parks in the desert between Yuma and Phoenix. It generates 290 megawatts of power—enough electricity to fuel 230,000 homes in neighboring California at peak capacity. The Agua Caliente Solar Project represents a significant advance in the technology compared with just four years ago, when the largest solar facility in the U.S. generated only 20 megawatts. “Solar has completely arrived as a competitive energy resource,” says Peter Davidson, executive director of the Loan Programs Office at the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE).

Pictured is “the storefront Islamic centre in Calgary where Abu Dujana al-Muhajir said he started a prayer group.” With whom did he pray? To whom did he speak? What did the other people there think of his promotion of the jihad in Syria? Does anyone know? Does anyone care? Note also his dismissal of Canada’s professional “moderate Muslims” (both of whom are just as viciously arrogant and intellectually vacuous as their Islamic supremacist brethren), Tarek Fatah and Mubin Shaikh (who embarrassed himself in debate with me here).

Islamic reformers, sincere or self-serving, are always challenged by hardliners on Islamic grounds. And none have ever formulated a coherent or cogent response to the jihadists’s exegesis of the Qur’an.

(NaturalNews) The development of the first vaccine for polio back in the 1950s is still glorified in the mainstream media as one of the most important public health breakthroughs in recorded history. But a little-known documentary which aired on the Canadian news network CBC back in 1997 tells a much different story about the polio vaccine’s safety and effectiveness, including its known tainting with a monkey virus linked to causing cancer and death.

Presented on YouTube by the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC), the documentary, which first aired on the network’s Current Affairs: Beyond the Headlines program the fifth estate, investigates the history of how the first polio vaccines were made. Attributed primarily to the late Jonas Salk, the development of the polio vaccine involved extracting the kidneys of rhesus monkeys and infecting them with polio in order to produce a vaccine serum.

Sounds simple, right? Except for the fact that many of the monkeys from which tissue was taken were infected with deadly viruses that would end up harboring in and infecting humans. The main virus of concern is known as SV40, which later studies revealed is associated with causing brain cancer. Though it had previously only been thought to infect other monkeys, SV40 was eventually determined to have made its home inside the bodies of millions of humans injected with the polio vaccine.

“It was believed that SV40 only infected monkeys and shouldn’t be found in humans in any circumstance, let alone associated with tumors,” explained Dr. Daniel Bergsagel, M.D., a pediatric oncologist from Canada who had been treating kids with cancer in Atlanta at the time when the documentary was made. Dr. Bergsagel and his colleagues made the inadvertent discovery that SV40 was present in tumor samples collected from sick children.

As it turns out, dozens of monkey viruses were present in the earliest polio vaccines administered during the mass vaccination campaigns that took place back in the 1950s and 1960s. And the worst part is that those working on the vaccines, including Salk and his colleague Albert Sabin, had to have known that the monkeys from which they were producing vaccines were heavily contaminated.

“The best estimate we can get right now is that there was at least 26 different monkey viruses in those preparations,” added Dr. Howard B. Urnevitz, a microbiologist and vaccinologist from California who has long studied the process by which vaccines are made, to CBC during an interview.

You can watch the full, three-part documentary as presented on YouTube by visiting the following link:

Two of Sweden’s most prominent politicians have asked their European counterparts “to wake up”. Cecilia Malmström and Birgitta Ohlsson argue that it is time to fight “Hitler’s ideological heirs, who are marching towards our legislative assemblies”.

On May 9th, 1945 there were celebrations across Europe as the Third Reich capitulated and the second world war finally ended. Last week, some 200 Nazis from the Party of the Swedes demonstrated in Jönköping. They protested against the EU and brandished the slogan “Sweden for the Swedes”. Through the duration of the demonstration, church bells rang out across the southern Swedish town.

It was the first time since 1939 that the churches rang their bells to warn of danger.

Fertility figures from Statistics Norway show that fewer and fewer men in Norway are fathering children. The share of men who are childless at age 45 rose from 14 percent in 1985 to 23 percent in 2013. The share of women who had not become mothers by age 45 increased from 10 percent in 1985 to 13 percent in 2013.

The Dalai Lama said on Wednesday he held no grudges against Norway’s government after they decided not to meet him on his trip to Oslo in order to avoid further damaging already fragile relations with China.

A group of young boys attacked several other audience members at Palads cinema at 20:45 on Thursday during the showing of the rapper drama ‘Ækte vare’ (‘Flow’), Metroxpress reports.

A police spokesman said the brawl escalated when the group were told to lower their voices. Some movie-goers were taken to hospital with bruises and cuts after the boys hit them on the head with a blunt object.

The thugs, who eyewitnesses described as being of Middle Eastern appearance, managed to escape the police and are still on the loose.

Negotiations on new institutions to govern relations between Switzerland and the European Union are to start in the coming weeks after the Union’s member states on Tuesday (6 May) approved a mandate for the talks.

The adoption of the mandate had been delayed after Swiss voters in February endorsed caps on immigration from the EU, which would violate a 1999 agreement on free movement. The Swiss government has until June to present its ideas on how to implement the caps, which it has to do by February 2017…

From wine tasting to cooking demonstrations, from music to traditional handicraft, audiences will be able to enjoy a Mediterranean fair for all tastes organised by the Municipality of Limassol (Cyprus) under the CBCMed-funded MARAKANDA project from 16 to 18 May.

Herman Van Rompuy, the president of the European Council, is urging government leaders to identify the policy priorities of the European Union in the immediate aftermath of the European Parliament elections…

European voters generally pay little attention to European Parliament, but over the years, the body has become increasingly powerful. Already, a representative in Brussels wields more influence than one in Berlin. And the gap is growing.

BRUSSELS — It seemed like a gathering of old friends. Jean-Claude Juncker from the centre-right European People’s Party and Martin Schulz from the Social-Democrats are both pro-European, both from the same generation and both represent parties that are likely to form a grand coalition after the EU elections.

A third of children in Berlin are living in households dependent on unemployment benefit Hartz IV. Despite sustained economic growth and falling unemployment, the numbers of families receiving state benefits rose in the last year.

The district of Neukölln was the second highest with almost 50 percent, followed by the eastern districts of Marzahn-Hellersdorf (41 percent) and Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg (40 percent).

(ANSAmed) — ATHENS, MAY 8 — A new opinion poll on voting intentions for European Parliament elections shows leftist opposition party Syriza ahead of conservative coalition leaders New Democracy by 2%. Conducted by Pulse for the weekly To Pontiki newspaper, the survey will be published on Friday as Kathimerini online reports today. The poll shows Syriza taking the lead with 22.5%, followed by Prime Minister Antonis Samaras’s conservative party which stands at 20.5%. Ultranationalist Golden Dawn is at third place with 9%, followed by To Potami (The River), a center-left initiative set up by the television journalist Stavros Theodorakis, at 7%. Socialist Pasok’s grouping with other center-left parties, known as the Olive Tree (Elia) alliance, also scores 7%, ahead of the Communist Party (KKE) on 6.5%.

Greece has the worst education system in the EU, according to a study compiled by the Economist Intelligence Unit for the British publishing firm Pearson, reports Kathimerini. The rankings are based in part on students’ performance in school examinations. Greece’s education minister said the findings confirm their own observations.

Frank Gehry, the designer of Spain’s iconic Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, was on Wednesday awarded the country’s prestigious Prince of Asturias Award For the Arts.

The 85-year-old Canadian-born American beat out 36 candidates from 19 countries to take the prize. By doing so, he became the sixth architect to claim the prize awarded by the Prince of Asturias Foundation.

Gehry’s titanium covered Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao is his best-known work. Opened in 1997, it has helped breathe new life into the city, drawing millions of visitors every year.

A Muslim, headscarfed Greek woman is running for a seat for her country at the European Parliament, with an eye on preventing any discrimination against Muslims and to ensure equality for Greek Muslims.

Anna Stamou is significant in that she is the first headscarfed nominee in the European Parliament (EP) elections on May 25 and will be the first such MP if elected.

Stamou, wife to an Egyptian husband, describes herself as an active woman, not only in dealing with regional issues but also making efforts for the “big picture.”

“I have been nominated from the Eco Green Party Greece — the ecological political party that is a member of the European Green party — as it perfectly reflects my opinions,” Stamou tells Anadolu Agency in an exclusive interview.

(AGI) Reggio Calabria, May 8 — Former minister Claudio Scajola allegedly helped fugitive Amedeo Matacena Jr, a former Forza Italia member of Parliament, charged and convicted for complicity with the Mafia. Scajola was arrested on Thursday morning by the DIA, the anti-Mafia investigation department, in Reggio Calabria, following a warrant issued by the preliminary investigations judge. Matacena is a fugitive in Dubai and, according to investigators, attempted to move to Lebanon, with the help of the former minister.

(AGI) Milan, May 8 — Tax police officers in Milan, together with the DIA, anti-mafia agency, arrested seven people on Thursday on a warrant issued by the prosecutor’s office. The charges include corruption and bid rigging in calls for tenders for Milan Expo 2015. Among the people arrested were two managers of Infrastrutture Lombarde, Primo Greganti and Angelo Paris .

Turin — The party of Premier Matteo Renzi received a threat letter on Thursday from opponents of the encroaching TAV high-speed-rail line around Turin. “You are the true terrorists,” said the anonymous missive sent to the Piedmont office of the center-left Democratic Party (PD), in reference to a group of anti-TAV militants arrested in recent months on charges of terrorism. “You can’t hide forever behind your machine of servants.

We’ll see you scumbags soon”. The letter is the latest in a long series of threats against constructing a rail link between Lyon and Turin.

In February police and officials received notice from a group called the Armed Operational Nuclei (NOA) that said its “revolutionary court” had condemned them to death for allegedly “repressing” protests against work on the TAV line north of Turin.

The well-known No-TAV citizens’ movement trying to stop the link disassociated itself from the NOA and condemned its actions, saying it objected to “violence against persons”.

The threats come as a chilling reminder of leftist and rightist terrorist campaigns in Italy that left an estimated 2,000 dead between 1969 and 1981.

Opponents argue the rail link is wasteful of public funds and destroys pristine countryside.

Supporters say it will cut down on automobile and truck pollution and make shipping and transit more efficient.

The Italian and French governments have insisted that the link will not only speed passenger and freight traffic but also boost both countries’ economies.

(ANSA) — Genoa, May 8 — Shanghai Electric Group signed a deal Thursday to buy 40% of power engineering firm Ansaldo Energia for 400 million euros.

The deal includes two joint ventures in China for the production of gas turbines for Asian markets and was witnessed by Premier Matteo Renzi who visited Ansaldo during a trip to its head office in Genoa.

A research centre in China is also part of the deal.

In the past, Ansaldo Energia had been a target for several firms, including a South Korean company, before about 85% of Ansaldo was sold by Italian defence giant Finmeccanica to the state-owned Italian Strategic Fund (FSI) late last year.

Last September, published reports suggested that South Korea’s Doosan Heavy Industries was near to reaching an agreement with Finmeccanica to buy Ansaldo Energia.

Sources at that time had suggested a price as high as 1.4 billion euros for Ansaldo in its entirety.

(ANSA) Rome — The shareholder assembly of the state-controlled Italian oil giant ENI SpA on Thursday rejected the Italian treasury’s directive to institute new integrity requirements for top executives.

The measure would have meant dismissal or exclusion from the board for any executives holding a lower court conviction on company-related charges.

While a 59.45% majority of shareholders voted in favour of the rule change, two-thirds are required to modify the company charter. Outgoing ENI Chief Executive Paolo Scaroni, who ceded his post to his replacement Claudio Descalzi at the same assembly, holds such a conviction.

A court in the northern city of Rovigo at the end of March sentenced two former chief executives of Italian electricity utility Enel, Franco Tato’ and Paolo Scaroni, to three years in prison over emissions from Enel’s Porto Tolle power plant. The pair were also banned from holding public office for five years.

Scaroni’s sentence was handed down as the end of his three-year mandate as chief executive was coming up for review by the Italian executive. ENI is 30%-controlled by the Italian state.

(ANSA) — Rome, May 8 — The Italian government has not been able to unload the first nine used Maseratis it listed on eBay as part of Premier Matteo Renzi’s efforts to sell off public assets deemed to be unnecessary.

The luxury vehicles were put on the Internet sales and auction site on April 28, with bidding on seven unsuccessful.

Bidding on the final two won’t close until Friday.

Cheaper vehicles flew off the online auction block earlier as the Renzi government moved to sell a range of official chauffeured vehicles that were assigned to high-ranking public officials.

The first 25 State vehicles sold yielded gross proceeds of 250,000 euros, the government has said.

(ANSAmed) — ROME — Silvio Berlusconi on Friday started doing community service at a centre for the elderly, the Sacra Famiglia Catholic Foundation that runs the facility near Milan said.

A union protester shouting he should be in jail was taken away as the ex-premier entered the building to start helping Alzheimer’s patients. Last month a Milan court ruled the media magnate could serve the remaining year of a four-year sentence for a 370-million-euro tax fraud at his media empire by working at least four hours a week at the centre.

The alternative was for the 77-year-old media magnate to be put under house arrest, as he is too old to actually go to jail under standard Italian legal practise.

Italy’s former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi has begun a period of community service following his conviction for tax fraud. As he arrived, the billionaire was heckled by a protester dressed as a clown.

Angela Merkel is hosting Francois Hollande for informal talks. The conservative chancellor has championed austerity throughout the eurozone crisis, while Hollande has advocated stimulus during his two years in power.

There has been a six-fold increase in throat cancer caused by the human papillomavirus (hpv) in the Netherlands over the past 20 years, according to VU university researcher Michelle Rietbergen.

While smoking and alcohol can lead to throat cancer, around 30% of the 550 cases now recorded a year come via the virus, Rietbergen has found. Hpv is sexually transmitted and can lead to cervical cancer in women.

Having a large number of sex partners and oral sex are risk factors for developing hpv-related cancer.

Geert Wilders thinks the leaders of France’s Front National and Austria’s FPÖ are suitable political partners and there is nothing in the way of working with them in Europe, he told television current affairs show Nieuwsuur on Wednesday night.

Wilders is hoping to form a European parliamentary grouping with the two parties and other far-right populist parties after the May 22 and 25 elections but has been criticised for linking up with anti-semitic parties.

Earlier in the day, the Dutch Jewish organisation CIDI accused Wilders of compromising his principles for trying to form an alliance with far right European parties.

Wilders said during the interview he did not want to look to the past. ‘These political leaders are okay. I have looked them in the eyes and talked to them. If I thought they were not okay, I would work with them,’ the PVV founder said.

Norwegian photographer Jan Olsen has shot this stunning time lapse video of reindeer arriving by boat back to their island home far inside the Arctic circle in northern Norway.

Reindeer herders use old Norwegian Navy landing craft to ferry some 10,000 reindeer every year to their summer pastures on islands in Troms and Finnmark counties, and Olsen wanted to catch a herd swarming like birds or bees.

“We knew there was going to be some movement inside the corral, and I though out the whole thing in advance,” he told Norway’s NRK channel of the footage. “I was OK”.

Pope Francis has called for greater efforts to resist the “economy of exclusion” in a speech at the Vatican, advocating greater efforts to combat poverty. The new pope has frequently criticized economic inequality.

Campaigners from Orkney, Shetland, and the Western Isles are pushing for a referendum that could grant them independence from Scotland on the grounds that they were all historically part of Norway.

The group, Our Islands Our Future, lodged a petition with the Scottish Parliament on 29 April, and have collected some 1,177 in support of their proposal.

“Whether you live in Shetland, Orkney or the Western Isles, you will know that your part of the world was once in Norway and still has its own traditions and culture which set it apart from the rest of what is now Scotland,” Malcolm Lamont, from Lerwick in the Shetland Islands wrote introducing the petition.

The campaigners want a separate referendum for their islands on 18 September 2014, when Scotland is itself voting on whether to continue as part of the United Kingdom.

France marks its eighth annual slavery Remembrance Day on Saturday, an event that has already sparked a heated debate which is threatening to derail the planned commemorations.

Events are scheduled to be held across the country, but a handful of right-wing politicians have already threatened to mar the commemoration, equating the day to a form of “self-flagellation”.

Earlier this week, Thierry Mariani, a member of parliament from France’s conservative UMP party, caused outrage after tweeting that the recent kidnapping of more than 200 schoolgirls in Nigeria was “a reminder that Africa did not wait for the West to practice slavery”. He concluded his post with the hashtag #décupabilisation, which translates to “guilt free”.

Rejection by Nigel Farage, head of Britain’s UKIP, and Morten Messerschmidt, lead candidate for the Danish People’s Party in the up-coming European elections effectively dashes Marine Le Pen’s hopes of presiding over an influential 7-country Eurexit group at the EU Parliament. The main issue is anti-Semitism.

PARIS. While granting that National Front leader Marine Le Pen has shown courage and perspicacity on some crucial issues, Nigel Farage says she has failed to rid the party of its endemic anti-Semitism.

In a mail to Dispatch International, MEP Morten Messerschmidt writes that from the beginning he has distanced himself from the National Front.

“As I read the party and its history, it has deep anti-Semitic roots. Regrettably it seems to attract support. This can only be explained by the fact that the other French parties have failed the French people, who only have the National Front to vote for if they want to express their criticism of the EU,” says Messerschmidt.

“At the election in 2009, Nicolas Sarkozy managed to appeal to EU-skeptical Frenchmen by criticizing the EU’s immigration policy and open borders. But today they have been forced into the arms of Le Pen. That is a bad omen for France and Europe. I will not cooperate with a party like the National Front,” says Morten Messerschmidt.

A review of material readily available in French lends credibility to Farage’s and Messerschmidt’s evaluation.

Midway between the Municipal and the European elections, National Front (Front National, FN) VP Florian Philippot says the FN is France’s number one party and Marine Le Pen will be president in 2017. For all the ballyhoo over the FN’s inexorable ascension, the party won a small handful of municipalities, none of its bigwigs were elected (including Philippot who ran for mayor of Forbach), and the opposition UMP (Union for a Popular Movement) inflicted an unprecedented defeat on the Socialists without any FN alliances.

Philippot, chairman of the European campaign, promises they’ll send 15 to 20 deputies to the EU Parliament where they’ll lead a strong Eurexit coalition and liberate France from the EU and the euro. While other parties will certainly indulge in opportunistic euroskepticism during the campaign, says Philippot, “We have ideas and convictions.” Polls are showing a too close to call race for first and second position, with the Socialists in third place.

Is the National Front a political party or a posture? Founded in 1972, the FN was a fringe group with virtually no experience in government, indelibly colored by the foul mouth of its leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen. The election of heir apparent Marine Le Pen as president in January 2011 earned overnight legitimacy for the long decried Front National.

No political broadcast is now complete without an FN voice snidely dismissing the two major parliamentary parties — UMP and PS (the Socialists) — as a Siamese twin that never keeps its promises.

The FN is a double-edged sword. Issues like national identity, security, laïcité (i.e., secularism), or defense against Islamization are labeled “FN.” And the FN, claiming ownership of these issues, draws voters away from the UMP. This contributed largely to the defeat of UMP candidate Nicolas Sarkozy’s 2012 presidential re-election bid.

While the notoriously provocative father has remained honorary president of the FN, the daughter claims to have banished unsavory ideas and elements that — unfairly in her view — justified its “demonization.” Cleansed of anti-Semitism, Holocaust denial, racism and other reprehensible traits associated with the “Far Right Populist” strain of postwar European politics, the National Front is claimed to be the West’s only line of defense against Islamization, EU tyranny, globalization, cheap Chinese merchandise, rampant capitalism, the banks, the international oligarchy that exploits the hardworking little man … and what other evils?

According to an investigation published in January 2014 by Frédéric Haziza, Vol au-dessus d’un nid de fachos (Flight over a nest of fascists), the National Front gravitates in a “Populist Far Right” constellation that includes the skinhead Serge Ayoub, the intellectual Alain Soral, the ex-comic Dieudonné M’Bala M’Bala, the PR wizard Frédéric Chatillon, and assorted like-minded personalities. Members and leaders of these groups fall in and out with each other, conveniently allowing them to disavow specific reprehensible acts or associations, but their core principles are largely compatible: Third Reich nostalgia, Holocaust denial, obsessive hatred of Jews/Zionists, rejection of capitalism and parliamentary democracy.

Historically and currently, these groups maintain close financial and ideological ties with Arab-Muslim powers: Jean-Marie Le Pen was a friend and ally of Saddam Hussein and today’s National Socialists (a more accurate designation, in my opinion, than “populist Far Right”) are tied to the Iranian and Syrian regimes, Hizbollah, and their ilk.

They speak out against immigration and Islamization but hang out with homegrown jihadis, and woo Muslim youth from the suburbs — in French: the banlieues — to their cause…

Sharon DeWitte of the University of South Carolina has conducted a careful examination of the skeletal remains of more than 1,000 men, women, and children who lived before, during, and after the Black Death that struck London in 1347. “I look for the parts of the skeleton that are going to tell me about age at death and sex, and then I look for a suite of skeletal stress markers that give me a general idea of how healthy people were,” DeWitte said.

She found that frail people were more likely to die when infected with the plague, and survivors went on to live long lives, perhaps because they benefited from a better diet and improved housing. “Because so many people died from the Black Death, wages increased for the people who survived. People of all social classes were eating better food, which would have had strong effects on health,” she explained.

UK environment secretary Owen Paterson’s has failed to represent Scotland after admitting breaching an agreement to make Scotland’s opposition to genetically modified (GM) crops clear to European ministers.

The Westminster environment boss promised Scottish Environment Minister Paul Wheelhouse that he would say that Scotland took a different view on GM from the UK at negotiations at the European Union’s Environment Council in Brussels. But he then failed to do so.

Mr Paterson this week told the Scottish Parliament’s Rural Affairs Committee that it was “unfortunate” that he had not said what had been agreed and claimed he used the wrong speaking notes at the EU meeting.

The UK is Europe’s “special” case, and EU leaders should find ways to accommodate its “specificity”, Jose Manuel Barroso has said.

In a speech at the Humboldt university in Berlin on Thursday (8 May) where he set out his legacy and thoughts for the EU’s future, the outgoing European Commission President stated that “for historical, geopolitical and economic reasons the case of the UK may be seen as a special one”.

“I passionately believe that Europe is stronger with the UK as its member, and that the UK is stronger as a member of the European Union than on its own.”

But he indicated that the package of exemptions and opt-outs from EU policies secured by the UK could not be made available for other countries.

Dozens of children across the Bradford district remain potentially at risk of being groomed for sex. Latest figures released by police show officers are now working with 73 children who are judged to be in danger of being targeted for sexual exploitation. That compares with a total of 72 young people who were considered at risk in January 2013.

The police also said that within Bradford district, there are 38 men who have been arrested and bailed pending further inquiries relating to these types of offences…

The media is already trying to downplay it: last night’s UKIP rally in London was raucous, glorious, and dare I say… electric. Even a lot of the hecklers in the room left without saying a word — such was the impact. UKIP promised a political earthquake in the UK on May 22nd. It delivered an earthquake in London last night…

Not long after the murder of Drummer Lee Rigby in Woolwich last summer, I wrote a piece in the Daily Telegraph criticising the concentration on the alleged backlash against Muslims. In particular, I attacked an organisation called Tell Mamma, run by Fiyaz Mughal, for appearing to suggest that the unpleasant EDL was as monstrous as al-Qa’eda. Later in the piece, I wrote that, when you publish on such matters, you are all too often ‘subject to “lawfare” — a blizzard of solicitors’ letters claiming damages for usually imagined libels’. So it proved. Along came a solicitor’s letter from the firm of Farooq Bajwa, saying that I had described Mr Mughal as an extremist. Last week, I attended a court hearing. Was the complainant right about the ‘natural and ordinary meaning’ of my words? This week the judge, Mr Justice Tugendhat, determined that he was wrong, so we won. Mr Mughal, who is, indeed, not an extremist but seems to be a fool, has now lost two legal cases (including mine) and a PCC case on related matters. What is depressing is the habit among some Muslim groups of seeing ordinary unfavourable comment as something to suppress through the law. Why can’t they debate, not litigate?…

Conmen set up phone scam in Edgbaston B&B to scare elderly people out of thousands of pounds of life savings

A trio of fraudsters have admitted scaring nervous OAPs out of thousands of pounds in a phone scam operated from a Birmingham Bed and Breakfast.

Imran Miah, Hussain Abdirahman and Masum Uddin, all from Camden, London, tricked nine people — the oldest an 86-year-old woman from Sutton Coldfield — out of £11,000 collectively using scare stories designed to panic them into handing over bank cards and PIN numbers.

All three men admitted conspiracy to defraud when they appeared at Birmingham Crown Court.

Abdirahman was jailed for 37 months, while Miah and Uddin were each handed 20 month sentences…

The former chairman of Northern Foods and Express Dairies says clearer labelling is only half an answer for supermarkets caught off-guard by the strength of the storm

When it comes to eating halal meat, I prefer to take my lead from the animal welfare experts rather than religious leaders. The British Veterinary Association and the RSPCA both say that failure to stun an animal before slaughter — as is sometimes, but by no means always, the case with halal meat — causes unnecessary suffering.

That’s sufficient for me to keep it off my table at home but, at the same time, I’m someone who has spent his professional life in the food industry. I can therefore recognize that halal products now represent a major UK market, worth an estimated £2.6 billion per year. The challenge is therefore to reconcile the two…

[Reader comment by sonofboudicca on 9 May 2014.]

Supermarkets won’t clearly label halal meat because they know most right-thinking consumers would not buy it. We seem to be being colonised by those of the Islamic faith. In other words we have to adapt to their customs and practices, not the other way around.

Supermarkets and restaurant chains are selling halal meat to millions of customers without telling them.

The switch to slaughtering animals in line with Islamic ritual saves money because the end product can be eaten by Muslims and non-Muslims alike.

More than 70 per cent of all New Zealand lamb in supermarkets is from halal abattoirs — a fact not stated on labelling. Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Morrisons, Waitrose and Marks & Spencer all confirmed yesterday they sell the imported meat.

It also emerged that all chicken served by Pizza Express is halal — something made clear only on the company’s website.

Mainstream society is tiptoeing around minority groups for fear of causing offence

It turns out I am a regular consumer of halal meat. Despite being a godless former Catholic who would rather chew tin foil than read the Koran, I’ve been tucking into animals slaughtered in accordance with Islamic tradition. How come? It’s Pizza Express’s fault. I’m a fan of Pizza Express, especially its Pollo ad Astra pizza, and on Wednesday it was revealed that all of Pizza Express’s chicken is halal. So all those cajun-spiced pieces of plump white flesh I’ve been scoffing came from birds that had their throats slit while they were still alive as someone chanted “Allahu akbar” three times (though Pizza Express insists they are all stunned first)…

Nick Clegg was joined by students from Stepney Green Maths and Computing College for the launch of a diversity programme. The Deputy Prime Minister visited the National Portrait Gallery to support the Naz Legacy Foundation, which aims to promote excellence in education and positive integration into society. For some of the youngsters from the four London schools invited to last week’s launch, it was their first trip to a gallery or museum…

Neighbours of two people killed in a fire described hearing an explosion and screaming when the blaze broke out early this morning. The woman, who did not want to be named, was at home in her flat on Moscow Drive, Tuebrook with her nine-year-old and six-month-old children.

Emergency services were called to the block of flats at about 5.30am and two people were found inside…

Pizza Express has been using only halal meat for years. All those orangey chicken bits that top pizzas and fill calzones come from poultry that have been slaughtered in the Muslim ritual way. It turns out, for of the biggest supermarket chains also sell meat that has been slaughtered this way — though their packaging doesn’t say so…

Two men accused of being part of a child sex ring in Peterborough have been cleared of all offences by a crown court judge.

Five men have been standing trial at Cambridge Crown Court accused of trafficking and raping eight girls who were aged between 13 and 16 at the time of the allegations, which date between 2008 and 2013.

Two of the group, Akash Yasin and Mohammed Aslam were cleared of all charges on the direction of Judge Mark Lucraft following legal argument…

A 36-year-old man remained in hospital yesterday after a collision with a car in Bradford, with police suggesting the incident may have been deliberate. The man is in a stable condition at Leeds General Infirmary after the incident, which happened in the city centre at 2.13pm on Monday. The pedestrian was hit by a dark coloured Corsa and suffered “serious injuries.”…

(WARSAW) — Poland’s foreign minister on Thursday said the Ukrainian crisis could lead Warsaw to speed up the country’s adoption of the euro as a way to boost its security through deeper EU integration.

Last year Poland’s finance minister said 10 years was a realistic timeline for joining the eurozone, while the prime minister said the process could remain on hold until at least 2019 because of a parliamentary impasse.

The ex-communist nation of 38 million people, which borders Ukraine and is central Europe’s largest economy, is obliged to join the 18-member single currency bloc under the terms of its European Union entry but there is no deadline for accession.

Republic of Kosovo is the only country in the region which has made the European Day-May 9 part of the official state holidays. Accused of corruption and organized crime, Kosovo has been neglected by the European Union for these reasons.

Kosovo also has a weak economy, with the highest unemployment and poverty rates. Meanwhile, Kosovo also “enjoys” a bad reputation in the eyes of the international community.

(ANSAmed) — CAIRO — Egypt’s culture and archaeological heritage minister Mohamed Ibrahim announced on Thursday the discovery of a tomb dating back 3,000 years for an army archive guard and a royal messenger to foreign countries.

The news was reported by the Egyptian wire service MENA. The 12×6-meter tomb was found by archaeologists from the University of Cairo not far from the step pyramid of Djoser in Saqqara, about 30 kilometers south of Cairo. The minister noted that the tomb was covered in inscriptions and brightly colored decorative elements and that it was extremely well-preserved.

(ANSAmed) — CAIRO, MAY 8 — Egypt is preparing to bring in stiffer sentences for those found guilty of sexual crimes in Egypt. The government has approved amendments to the law on sexual harassment providing for sentences ranging from six months to five years in jail for whosoever “accosts others in a public or private place through following or stalking them, using gestures or words or through modern means of communication or in any other means through actions that carry sexual or pornographic hints”, according to the Al-Ahram website. Sentences will be longer for repeat offenders. Sexual harassment has become a growing problem in Egypt over the past ten years, and was especially violent at some protests in Tahrir Square. Gang rapes were committed against women taking part in the protests by men who surrounded them and took advantage of the circumstances presented by the mass gatherings.

Out of a hundred women interviewed in 27 governorates as part of an UN-Egyptian government survey in April, 99% said they had suffered some form of sexual violence, ranging from harassment to rape.

Tunisian President Moncef Marzouki on Tuesday (May 6th) offered amnesty to jihadists, provided they had never been convicted of murder.

“We decided at the last security council meeting that there will be an amnesty and reconciliation law for those without blood on their hands — they still have a place among our people,” AFP quoted President Moncef Marzouki as telling soldiers in Jebel Chaambi…

Yom Ha’atzma’ut, Israeli Independence Day, is a joyous holiday. In Israel, every year, from Eilat to Metulla, from Tel Aviv to the Jordan Valley, everyone across every spectrum — secular, religious; rich, poor; left, Right, Ashkenazi, Sephardi — is out celebrating.

The reconstitution of the Jewish state, and its growth within three generations from a third world economic and military basket case into a prosperous and powerful country, is among the most astounding success stories in human history. Certainly it is the greatest story of Jewish success since Joshua led a nation of former slaves in conquering and settling the land of Israel some 3,500 years ago.

And today, three generations after the enslavement and genocide of European Jewry and the expulsion of the Jews from Islamic lands, the Jewish people in the Land of Israel have built arguably the most dynamic society in the world.

For the Jews of the Diaspora, Israel’s success should be a source of enduring pride and joy. Independence Day should be celebrated by Jews throughout the world. But in recent years, associations of Israel with joy have become increasingly rare.

As one Jewish student activist put it, the celebration on his campus was nothing more than “a bunch of kids eating cake..”

And at the same time, he explained, many students were posting statuses on their Facebook pages talking about how the day was “bittersweet because of the Nakba.”

A recent Hamas-backed children’s television show featured a child vowing to become a police officer so she could “shoot the Jews,” revealing anew the depraved indoctrination forced upon kids of Gaza, even as the terror group that leads it has joined forces with the Palestinian Authority.

The shocking display came in a recent episode of “Pioneers of Tomorrow,” a show aimed at young children and airing on Hamas’ state-run Al Aqsa TV station. In the show, a cuddly giant bee encourages young children to attack Jews, while a young girl presenter lauds one child’s uncle who is a policeman and “shoots Jews.”

Today the European Union has contributed €7.05 million to the payment of the April salaries and pensions of approximately 70,000 Palestinian civil servants and pensioners of the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. This contribution, made through the PEGASE mechanism, adds to that of the governments of Denmark (c.€5.36 million), Ireland (€1.0 million), Italy (€1.0 million), Luxembourg (€1.0 million) and The Netherlands (c.€0.98 million).

“The EU has consistently sought both to help ensure the well-being of the Palestinian population and — in the context of a commitment to a two-state solution — engage in Palestinian institution-building. Over many years the EU has proven to be Palestinian people’s most reliable partner. The predictability of our financial support has always been guaranteed despite the very unpredictable political climate,” said the EU Representative Mr. John Gatt-Rutter.

For the past two days there are have been a spate of articles triggered by Newsweek contributing editor, Jeff Stein, who wrote a Spy Talk column with accusations alleging that Israeli Intelligence in the US is at “alarming levels” , “Israel won’t stop spying on the US”. Stein’s accusations:

According to classified briefings on legislation that would lower visa restrictions on Israeli citizens, Jerusalem’s efforts to steal U.S. secrets under the cover of trade missions and joint defense technology contracts have “crossed red lines.”

This despite a long term valued collaboration by US defense intelligence agencies with Israel. Stein’s anonymous sources appear to paint all Israelis as potential spies.

Stein’s allegations were immediately slammed by Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman and an Israeli Embassy official in Washington. The Jewish Press noted:

First of all, these are malicious accusations. . . I would not agree to any spying on the United States, not in any form, directly or indirectly.

Israeli Embassy spokesperson Aaron Sagui also flatly denied the charges, telling Newsweek, “Israel doesn’t conduct espionage operations in the United States, period. We condemn the fact that such outrageous, false allegations are being directed against Israel.

The Stein accusations come amidst strains in the relations between the Administration and Israel over the collapse of the failed final status agreements with the Palestinian Authority. This was reflected in Ynet interviews with an unidentified “senior US official” many believe to be former US Ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk. The Ynet reports suggested that the US might impose its own terms on both the PA newly unified with Hamas and Israel.

Moreover, tensions between Washington and Jerusalem have increased over the latter’s criticism of the P5+1 talks with Iran over curtailment of its nuclear program. That may be part of the agenda that National Security Advisor Susan Rice brought yesterday for discussions with the Netanyahu government. Those intelligence red line accusations may be behind the tightening of visas for visiting Israelis. This sudden swirl triggered by the Stein piece in Newsweek has led to an unidentified senior Israeli diplomatic official suggesting in a Ynet report that the accusation may have been “tainted by a whiff of anti-Semitism”. That is reflected in Stein’s Newsweek Spy Talk column interviews with former CIA officials resurrecting the rogue Israeli intelligence operation involving imprisoned American spy Jonathan Pollard.

Jeff Stein appears to be touting a line perpetrated by a former FBI intelligence director, David Szady, back in the middle part of the last decade that there was an Israeli mole or moles borrowing into our national security establishment based on the Pollard conviction for spying. Just recall the FBI sting operation against former Defense analyst Larry Franklin at DoD used against the two former AIPAC senior staffers. Rosen and Weissman were falsely accused. A Federal Judge dismissed the wrongful prosecution brought as a result of Szady’s false accusations. I wrote about this eight years ago in an Israpundit article: “Are we all Jonathan Pollards, now?”

An AFP article, based on Stein’s Newsweek column cites unidentified former Congressional aides in his report said:…

BAGHDAD, May 8 (Xinhua) — A total of 39 people were killed and 41 others wounded in separate violent incidents, including a security operation, across Iraq on Thursday, police said.

In northern Iraq, police carried out an offensive targeting insurgent groups in southern Mosul, some 400 km north of the Iraqi capital of Baghdad, killing 17 gunmen believed to be linked to the infamous blacklisted group the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant ( ISIL), a local police source told Xinhua on condition of anonymity…

Two years ago, it seemed almost inevitable that Syrian President Bashar Assad would be toppled. Despite a fierce military crackdown, people were still taking to the streets in exuberant anti-government protests and rebels were pressing their fight deeper into the capital, even placing a bomb inside a high-level security meeting that killed top regime officials including Assad’s brother-in-law.

Western leaders predicted Assad would fall in few months. Almost no one thinks that now.

Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan has been sharply critical of comments made by German President Joachim Gauck about his country’s democratic deficiencies. His assertiveness plays well with Turks in Germany, who could be a strong force in the next election.

They admire Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whom they view as their prime minister. Under Erdogan, Turkey returned to greatness, they say. He built highways, hospitals and schools. More importantly, he defied the international community. “Even the German president now knows that you can’t get away with criticizing Turkey,” says Sakip.

Even last summer, Erdogan tried to portray the Gezi Protests as a conspiracy mounted by foreign agents, the media and the Jewish “interest rate lobby”. Erdogan’s chief advisor, Yigit Bulut, even claimed that the German airline Lufthansa was behind the protests because it wanted to damage the image of upstart competitor Turkish Airlines. He also warned that foreign powers wanted to use psychokinesis, an alleged psychic ability to move objects using mental force, to murder the prime minister.

Vatican City — Pope Francis on Thursday recalled the Armenian genocide in the early 20th century during an audience with Karekin II, head of the Catholicate of Etchmiadzin of the Armenian Apostolic Church.

“The number of disciples who shed their blood for Christ in the tragic events of the last century is certainly higher than that of the early martyrs,” Francis told Karekin II, elected 132nd Supreme Patriarch and Catholicos of All Armenians in 1999.

“In this martyrology the children of the Armenian nation have a place of honour,” continued the Argentinian pontiff.

“Their tragic and noble testimony must not be forgotten,” he said.

“Just as in the early Church the blood of the martyrs sowed the seed of new Christians, so in modern times the blood of many Christians has become the seed of unity” among Christian churches, continued the pope. An estimated 1.5 million Armenians were systematically exterminated under the Ottoman Empire during the First World War in what is said to be the second most studied act of genocide after the Jewish Holocaust three decades later.

(AGI) — Riyadh, May 7 — A Saudi court has sentenced Raef Badawi, the blogger and co-founder of the Saudi liberal network website committed to the protection of human rights, to 10 years in prison and 1,000 lashes of the whip. Judges amended a previous sentence to seven years in prison and 600 lashes of the whip. The news was reported by the network’s director, Suad al-Shamari, who added that Badawi had been charged with insulting Islam. Badawi will also have to pay an amount equivalent to 191,846 euros. The activist was arrested on June 17, 2012 in Jeddah following an announcement on his website stating that he intended to organise a ‘Day for Liberalism.’ .

A Saudi court has imprisoned blogger Raif Badawi for 10 years for “insulting Islam” and setting up a liberal web forum, local media report. He was also sentenced to 1,000 lashes and ordered to pay a fine of 1 million riyals ($266,000; £133,000).

Amnesty International called the verdict “outrageous” and urged the authorities to quash the verdict.

Mr Badawi, the co-founder of a website called the Liberal Saudi Network, was arrested in 2012. A Saudi newspaper close to the government reported that he had lost his appeal against an earlier, more lenient sentence of seven years and three months in jail and 600 lashes.

Last year he was cleared of apostasy, which could have carried a death sentence. Mr Badawi had previously called for 7 May to be a “day for Saudi liberals”. The website he set up has since been closed.

About a month before the elections in Belgium, the government released a new official number of Belgian fighters engaged in the Syrian civil war. This article was posted by most large Belgian newspapers (De Morgen, De Standaard and others based on La Libre Belgique). It clearly states that Belgian officials estimate the number of Belgian fighters in Syria around 150. It is quite obvious however that the Belgian government presents us the more merrier version.

As for my own research, my numbers are close to 400 (and according to insiders with close ties to the Moroccan community in Belgium, there are even more of them).

(ANSAmed) — ANKARA, MAY 8 — Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government plans to turn Istanbul’s Hagia Sofia Basilica into a mosque in the afternoon and evening and a museum in the morning. The historical monument, which draws millions of tourists every year, will have the Byzantine frescoes covering its walls cast into shadow by ‘dark light’ so as to avoid offending Islam.

The government would thus like to turn what is today seen as a symbol of Christianity back into a place of worship for Muslims, as it was after the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453. Confirmation of the plan came on Thursday from the Turkish pro-government daily Yeni Safak, after press leaks last week in Radikal reported the prime minister’s intention to pray in the Byzantine basilica prior to the August presidential elections, possibly as early as May 29. The date is a highly symbolic one, as it marks the 561st anniversary of the fall of Constantinople into the hands of the Ottomans. A few days later the basilica became a mosque on the orders of Mehmet II the Conqueror ad remained so until 1934, when on the decision of the father of the modern Turkish ‘secular Republic Mustafa Kemal Ataturk it was made into a museum. A campaign to turn the Hagia Sofia back into a mosque has been brewing for quite some time in the country, raising alarm among Christian communities in the east. Over the past few months appeals have been made by Deputy Prime Minister Bulent Arinc and the imam of the Sultanhamet mosque, Mustafa Akgul.

The threat to reopen Hagia Sofia to Muslim worship has already led to heated criticism from Patriarch of Constantinople Bartholomew I and the Greek government. The head of the Eastern Orthodox Church warned that “we and all other Christians will oppose it”. Athens has called it an “insult to the religious sensibilities of millions of Christians”. Radikal reports that the risk of a strong reaction from the West is what has prevented the Turkish prime minister from going ahead with the plan thus far, as his image at the international level has already suffered quite a few blows.

Nevertheless, an Islamic-leaning MP recently submitted a formal motion in the parliament to make Hagia Sofia into a mosque.

(ANSAmed) — ANKARA, MAY 8 — Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government plans to turn Istanbul’s Hagia Sofia Basilica into a mosque in the afternoon and evening and a museum in the morning. The historical monument, which draws millions of tourists every year, will have the Byzantine frescoes covering its walls cast into shadow by ‘dark light’ so as to avoid offending Islam.

The government would thus like to turn what is today seen as a symbol of Christianity back into a place of worship for Muslims, as it was after the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453.

A United States Special Operations commando and a Central Intelligence Agency officer in Yemen shot and killed two armed Yemeni civilians who tried to kidnap them while the Americans were in a barber shop in the country’s capital two weeks ago, American officials said on Friday.

The two Americans were whisked out of the volatile Middle East nation within a few days of the shooting, with the blessing of the Yemeni government, two senior American officials said.

In new interview, Director General of ECSSR says progress of Arab Societies relies on their cultural interaction with the world, noting that he does not advocate Westernization.

ABU DHABI — His Excellency Dr. Jamal Sanad Al-Suwaidi, Director General of the Emirates Center for Strategic Studies and Research (ECSSR), an erudite personality equipped with vast knowledge, talks about many issues. As always, he never puts limitations on questions and does not censor himself, except for self-imposed constraints based on experience, concerns, uncertainties and his personal considerations…

“A source close to Ukraine’s security agencies has told the RIA Novosti news agency that Brennan came to Kiev last Saturday and met with Ukraine’s security chiefs before the Ukrainian Interior Ministry said it was launching a special operation against those pressing for federalization in the east of Ukraine,” The Voice of Russia reported on April 14.

The CIA boasts a long and sordid record in stifling political movements, often with violence, those unacceptable to the political elite in the United States.

“Secret CIA operations constitute the usually unseen efforts to shore up unjust, unpopular, minority governments, always with the hope that overt military intervention … will not be necessary. The more successful CIA operations are, the more remote overt intervention becomes, and the more remote become reforms,” writes former CIA case officer Philip Agee.

Widely unknown and never mentioned by the establishment media is the fact the CIA has long shared a relationship with the ultra-nationalist and fascist faction now ruling Ukraine. The United States established important links with Ukrainian emigre groups beginning in 1945 at the outset of the Cold War began.

Three people were killed in a gunfight and rebels set a police station on fire in eastern Ukraine Friday, as Russian President Vladimir Putin hailed the return of Crimea to Russia in a military celebration marking victory over Nazi Germany.

Tens of thousands gathered in the Crimean port of Sevastopol to hear Putin speak, in his first trip to the Black Sea peninsula since its annexation in March. Putin called Russia’s incorporation of Crimea a “return to the Motherland” and a tribute to the “historical justice and the memory of our ancestors.”

Ukraine and members of NATO quickly condemned Putin’s visit. The U.S. called it “provocative and unnecessary.”

Dozens of people were killed last week in this Black Sea city when pro-unity crowds battled in the streets with those who support a sovereign Odessa and tend to be pro-Russian.

“Panic and fear scared our visitors away. We, too, feel worried and plan to keep the doors closed on May 9 to avoid the danger,” said Irina Kochergina, the manager of the City Garden cafe. Last Friday, mobs threw stones and shot at each other just a few steps from the restaurant’s doors.

Russia’s ongoing confrontation with the West has ignited debate inside and outside the U.S.-led NATO alliance about what its responsibilities are, and how much of its time and effort should be spent to prepare for and if necessary counter Russian President Vladimir Putin’s military ambitions.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is due to travel to China later this month, hoping to seal energy deals and build diplomatic relations amid a souring of relations between Moscow and the West. Analysts say Putin may struggle to win allies, though, in his war of words with the United States and Europe over the violence in Ukraine.

President Vladimir Putin flew in to Crimea on Friday for the first time since it was annexed by Moscow, proclaiming as he marked the Soviet victory in World War Two that incorporating the former Ukrainian territory had made Russia stronger.

In east Ukraine, where pro-Moscow rebels plan a referendum on Sunday to follow Crimea in breaking from Kiev, between three and 20 people were reported killed in the port of Mariupol, one of the biggest clashes yet between Ukrainian forces and separatists.

Russia has drafted a program for colonization of the moon, and plans to send the first expeditions to build a permanent lunar base in 2030, the Russian Izvestia daily said Thursday, citing an official document.

President Vladimir Putin has led parades in Moscow’s Red Square — to mark the ex-Soviet Union’s defeat of Nazi Germany — and then in Crimea. NATO says Putin’s visit to the annexed Ukrainian peninsula was “inappropriate.”

Russia’s military marked the 1945 Soviet victory over Nazi Germany on Friday, with a ceremony in Moscow attended by ex-Soviet-era veterans and presided over by President Putin. Putin later reviewed Russia naval forces in Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula annexed by Moscow in March after a controversial referendum to secede from Ukraine.

The massive display in Crimea’s port city of Sevastapol, home to Russia’s Black Sea fleet, included multiple fly-overs by Russian military aircraft, prompting a terse response from the interim authorities in Kyiv.

“Such a provocation is yet another confirmation that Russia is deliberately pursuing further escalation of tensions in Ukrainian-Russian relations,” Ukraine’s foreign ministry said in a statement.

The IMF has approved a $17 billion loan to Ukraine. The first $3.2 billion tranche has arrived on Wednesday.

It’s essential to identify the conditions attached to this Mafia-style “loan.” Nothing remotely similar to reviving the Ukrainian economy is in play. The scheme is inextricably linked to the IMF’s notorious, one-size-fits-all “structural adjustment” policy, known to hundreds of millions from Latin America and Southeast Asia to Southern Europe.

The regime changers in Kiev have duly complied, launching the inevitable austerity package — from tax hikes and frozen pensions to a stiff, over 50 percent rise on the price of natural gas heating Ukrainian homes. The “Ukrainian people” won’t be able to pay their utility bills this coming winter.

Predictably, the massive loan is not for the benefit of “the Ukrainian people.” Kiev is essentially bankrupt. Creditors range from Western banks to Gazprom — which is owed no less than $2.7 billion. The “loan” will pay back these creditors; not to mention that $5 billion of the total is earmarked for payments of — what else — previous IMF loans. It goes without saying that a lot of the funds will be duly pocketed — Afghanistan-style — by the current bunch of oligarchs aligned with the “Yats” government in Kiev.

The IMF has already warned that Ukraine is in recession and may need an extension of the $17 billion loan. IMF newspeak qualifies it as “a significant recalibration of the program.” This will happen, according to the IMF, if Kiev loses control of Eastern and Southern Ukraine — something already in progress.

Eastern Ukraine is the country’s industrial heartland — with the highest GDP per capita and home of key factories and mines, mostly in the Donetsk region, which happens to be largely mobilized against the neo-fascist/neo-nazi-aligned regime changers in Kiev. If the current conflagration persists, this means both industrial exports and tax revenues will go down.

So here’s the IMF prescription for the oligarch bunch — some of them actively financing Right Sector militias: As long as you’re facing a popular rebellion in Eastern and Southern Ukraine, relax; you will get additional IMF cash further on down the road. Talk about a crash course in disaster capitalism.

We want you to invade

Meanwhile, the Obama administration’s juvenile delinquent school of diplomacy remains on track: the plan is to entice Moscow to “invade.” Benefits would be immense. Washington would destroy once and for all the emerging strategic partnership between the EU, especially Germany, and Russia, part of a more organic interaction between Europe and Asia; keep Europe perennially under America’s thumb; and boost Robocop NATO after its Afghan humiliation.

Well, they are not juvenile delinquents for nothing. Yet this brilliant plan forgets a key component: enough competent troops willing to apply Kiev’s designs. The regime changers dissolved the Berkut federal riot police. Big mistake — because they are pros; they are unemployed; and now, holding a monster grudge, amply supporting Ukrainians in favor of federalization.

What the Ministry of Truth script imposed on all Western corporate media insists on labeling “pro-Russian separatists” are in fact Ukrainian federalists. They don’t want to split. They don’t want to join the Russian Federation. What they want is a federalized Ukraine with strong, autonomous provinces.

(AGI) Kiev, May 7 — Ukraine has received 3.19 billion dollars in aid from the International Monetary Fund as the first installment of 17 billion dollars, said the country’s central bank. The funds are to be used to pay Kiev’s debt to Gazprom for gas. The Russian company threatened to cut the supply unless the debt was paid this month ..

President Vladimir Putin is making his first visit to Crimea since Russia annexed it from Ukraine in March. He told crowds marking the 1945 Soviet victory over the Nazis that Crimea had shown loyalty to a “historical truth” in choosing to be part of Russia.

The Kiev government protested at the visit, calling it a “gross violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty”.

Britain is drawing up plans with the US and other European countries to “disarm” the threat of President Vladimir Putin using Russian gas and oil supplies as “a weapon” against Ukraine and its Eastern European neighbours.

Next month, David Cameron and other G7 leaders are expected to sign off on an “emergency response plan” to assist Ukraine this winter if Russia restricts gas supplies.

(AGI) — Washington, May 8 — France’s position in the Ukrainian crisis has become complicated in view of of its hard line stand against Russia while also selling weapons. The United States has expressed “concern” and opposes the sale of two Mistral large helicopter carrier warships worth 1 billion euros to Moscow. Unless there is a counter-order or more stringent sanctions against Russia, the first vessel named the Vladivostok will be delivered in October. The second ship, ironically named the Sebastopol is expected to be delivered next year.

GHAZNI, Afghanistan, May 8 (Xinhua) — Four Taliban militants were killed as their explosive device went off prematurely in Ghazni province with Ghazni as its capital 125 km south of Kabul on Thursday, police said.

“Four Taliban rebels were busy planting a mine on a road in Khushk area to target security personnel, but the device exploded accidentally, killing all four on the spot,” deputy to provincial police chief Assadullah Insafi told Xinhua…

BARAMULLA, Indian-controlled Kashmir, May 7 (Xinhua) — Violent clashes between young protesters and government forces, boycott and sporadic on violence Wednesday marred the India’s general elections’ final phase in restive Indian-controlled Kashmir, officials said.

India’s state air monitoring centre made a rare admission Thursday that pollution in New Delhi was comparable with Beijing, but disputed a WHO finding that the Indian capital had the dirtiest atmosphere in the world.

A study of 1,600 cities across 91 countries released on Wednesday by the WHO showed Delhi had the world’s highest annual average concentration of small airborne particles known as PM2.5 of 153.

Few Americans are aware of the potentially earth-shaking events currently unfolding in India. The left-center Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, which has ruled India for all but eight of its 67 years of national existence, is about to be voted out of power in favor of the conservative opposition under the leadership of Narendra Modi. As Chief Minister of Gujarat, Modi turned his state into a pro-business economic miracle that accounts for 72 percent of India’s new jobs and has its lowest unemployment rate.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that we might be shooting ourselves in the foot.

Modi is a free-market capitalist and unapologetic opponent of radical Islam in both its open and surreptitious variants. He gave a speech recently in the Northeast Indian state of Assam promising immediate and strong action to stop the large scale infiltration of illegal migrants and Bangladesh’s anti-Hindu violence…

Then why are some Americans — including some conservatives — trying to push India back into leftist hands and a foreign policy that has failed to confront the twin threat of Islamist and Leftist terrorism?

Lawyers on Thursday protested the killing of human rights lawyer Rashid Rehman who was shot dead in his office in Multan on Wednesday even as the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) condemned the fatal attack on its Multan Task Force coordinator.

HRCP in a statement said Rehman was a committed rights activist and lawyer and had been associated with HRCP for over 20 years. On April 10, 2014, the HRCP said that it had brought to the attention of the authorities that Rehman was being openly threatened by prosecution lawyers in the Multan District Prison where he was representing a blasphemy accused.

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s water crisis is now at par with terrorism in terms of being an existential threat to the country’s security.

This was the major concern raised by respondents, interviewed for Islamabad based think tank Jinnah Institute (JI)’s latest research report “Pakistan’s Water Discourse: Attitudes on Water Management Practices”, launched on Friday.

According to the report, insufficient water storage capacity has greatly impacted the availability of water, while public debate on developing new infrastructure has stalemated in recent years.

The limits of state capacity in addressing water-related challenges, underpinned by inadequate social infrastructure, lack of political consensus and financial constraints have been cited as the major roadblocks by a majority of respondents.

Blasphemy is a “crime” that belongs in the Middle Ages. It is a “crime” that suggests great intolerance on the part of those who classify it as a criminal offence. Freedom of expression is the bedrock on which all freedom is built.

The International Civil Liberties Alliance believes that blasphemy laws are an affront to basic human dignity and should be banned globally by international law. We call on our supporters to sign the petition.

The video below is currently going viral on the internet. It allegedly shows a triangular-shaped aircraft hovering over a Taliban position and firing a deadly volley of high explosives. It was reportedly filmed in eastern Afghanistan city of Asadabad by U.S. Marines in March of this year.

Rumors have circulated for years about the existence of secret military aircraft with advanced aviation capabilities. The alleged craft in the video resembles the experimental Aurora, a black project aircraft dismissed as conjecture by the military. In the late 1980s aerospace industry observers declared the Pentagon had the technological capability to build a Mach-5 replacement for the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird, an advanced, long-range, Mach 3 + strategic reconnaissance aircraft.

The aircraft pictured in the video, however, appears to hover over the target, a capability not attributed to the Aurora, said to be a high speed reconnaissance aircraft like its supposed predecessor.

China is considering plans to build a high-speed railway line to the US, the country’s official media reported on Thursday.

The proposed line would begin in north-east China and run up through Siberia, pass through a tunnel underneath the Pacific Ocean then cut through Alaska and Canada to reach the continental US, according to a report in the state-run Beijing Times newspaper.

Crossing the Bering Strait in between Russia and Alaska would require about 200km (125 miles) of undersea tunnel, the paper said, citing Wang Mengshu, a railway expert at the Chinese Academy of Engineering.

“Right now we’re already in discussions. Russia has already been thinking about this for many years,” Wang said.

The project — nicknamed the “China-Russia-Canada-America” line — would run for 13,000km, about 3,000km further than the Trans-Siberian Railway. The entire trip would take two days, with the train travelling at an average of 350km/h (220mph).

Try to imagine a commission of the U.S. government recommending that it get rid of the Department of Education, the Department of Health and Human Services, countless agencies, and, for good measure, restructure Medicare so it doesn’t go broke. There are few Americans who will argue that our federal government isn’t big enough and many who trace our present problems to Big Government.

That is why what has been occurring in Australia caught my attention because its voters rid themselves of a political party that imposed both a carbon tax and renewable energy tax on them. The purpose of the latter was to fund the building of wind turbines and solar farms to provide electricity.

On April 14, 2014, Boko Haram, (whose name either means “Western education is forbidden” or “a colonialist fraud being perpetrated against us”), captured three hundred Christian and Muslim Nigerian schoolgirls to become their sex and domestic slaves. The Muslim fundamentalists swooped down upon them as they were learning in a “forbidden” government secular school. Some girls managed to escape. Two hundred and seventy six girls are still missing.

The world media calls this a “kidnapping” in Nigeria. It is not a “kidnapping.” It is the face of Jihad, the way of Jihad. Boko Haram are not holding these girls for ransom, they are not willing to return them for money. They already view the girls as their God-given booty, and as sale-able property.

The girls are between the ages of twelve and fifteen. The Christian girls will be raped, converted to Islam, and then, like the Muslims girls, “married” to one of their captors. Some will be trafficked into the sex trade, which is pandemic throughout Africa and the Muslim Middle East. Sharia law allows men to purchase the sexual favors of a female child or a young woman for one hour, a week, or a month. Private and public brothels exist as well…

Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau: “They are slaves and I will sell them because I have the market to sell them”

What do 20 female US senators have in common with the mainstream media on the fate of the Boko Haram-abducted girls in Nigeria? Both are doing the girls and their loved ones an unneeded disservice by describing them only as “school girls”, neglecting to identify them as what they truly are: “Christian, Black” school girls.

Also glaringly missing from the story of the abduction of the “Christian, black” school girls is that radical Islam, including Boko Haram, is still in the thriving business of human slavery — while President Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle, continue to publicly portray America as the Grand Central of Slavery…

Muslim slavery is a harsh reality, and no window dressing can rid the world of it.

In American history, the Muslim slave trade goes all the way back to 1801 when the first Barbary War was fought. The war was fought because U.S. President Thomas Jefferson refused to pay the high tributes demanded by the Barbary states and because they were seizing American merchant ships and enslaving the crews for high ransoms. It was the first declared war the United States fought on foreign land and seas. (Wikipedia).

Islam and slavery go hand in hand and have been that way for centuries.

Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb has ties with Boko Haram and a well-developed set of networks for smuggling arms, narcotics and contraband

By now, much of the world has heard about Boko Haram and the kidnapping of hundreds of schoolgirls in northeastern Nigeria; and many voices are clamouring for the girls to be rescued. Good luck with that but those girls were not kidnapped for ransom, they were kidnapped to be raped… repeatedly.

Boko Haram is much more than another of the tribal insurgencies that pester Africa. They are Sunni Muslims who subscribe to the Salafist doctrines that inspire the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Qaeda. Their aim is to subject all of the Hausa and Fulani peoples of Nigeria to Sharia law and go on from there to build the Caliphate of the Umma. They have very real links to the Brotherhood and to African franchises of al-Qaeda.

Few people outside of Nigeria paid much attention to Boko Haram much before 2012, when they were attacking Animists (Nigerians who practice old traditional pagan ways), Sufi Muslims and — most particularly — Christians. One had to wonder how many more churches had to be incinerated with their congregations sealed inside before the rest of the world really started to pay attention to Boko Haram.

Two decades ago Nigeria’s military was seen as a force for stability across West Africa. Now it struggles to keep security within its own borders as an Islamist insurgency in the northeast kills thousands.

A lack of investment in training, failure to maintain equipment and dwindling cooperation with Western forces has damaged Nigeria’s armed services, while in Boko Haram they face an increasingly well-armed, determined foe.

A foe that abducted more than 200 secondary school girls in Chibok, northeastern Nigeria, nearly a month ago. The military still appears to have no idea exactly where they are, but denies it lacks the capacity to get them back.

(AGI) Paris, May 8 — A French soldier was killed overnight in northern Mali, the Elysee Palace reported on Thursday. This brings the number of French soldiers killed in Mali since the beginning of operation Serval to eight. The dead man was a legionnaire, a sergeant in the 2nd Foreign Parachute Regiment based in Calvi. Shortly afterwards the Defence Minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, paid tribute to the dead legionnaire, explaining that the soldier had been killed “by an improvised explosive device” planted by a jihadist group: “He died for the freedom of Mali, for Malian security, but also for the freedom and security of Europe and France,” he said in a radio and television interview.

PARIS, May 8 (Xinhua) — A French soldier in an operation to help the Malian government against Islamist rebels was killed in an explosion Thursday in northern Mali, according to the presidency office, the Elysee.

President Francois Hollande expressed in a statement “his deep sadness,” over the death of the national serviceman from the 2nd Foreign Parachute Regiment…

While Hillary Clinton has been vocal in drawing attention to the plight of 200 girls kidnapped by Boko Haram terrorists in Nigeria, she was in fact complicit in aiding the militant group in a number of different ways, including delaying the designation of the outfit as a terrorist organization, arming its allies in Africa and ignoring the slaughter of hundreds of Christians when she was Secretary of State…

Clinton’s State Department completely omitted these attacks from its 2011 report, which erroneously claimed that more Muslims than Christians died in the attacks. As Oritsejafor points out, 88.3% of the attacks targeted Christians, while just 2.9% were attacks on Muslims.

A potential motive for the State Department turning a blind eye to Boko Haram’s wave of terror in 2011 is the fact that the Obama administration was simultaneously arming and supporting the very Al-Qaeda groups allied with Boko Haram in Africa.

The Sultan of Sokoto and President-General of the Nigerian Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs (NSCIA)

Alhaji Muhammad Sa’ad Abubakar III and the Speaker of the House of Representatives Aminu Waziri Tambuwal will on Saturday in Abuja declared open a week-long Islamic Book Exhibition at the National Mosque.

A statement issued by Dr. Saheed Abdur-Rauf, Chief Executive Officer of the De Minaret International, the organiser of the exhibition said it is part of measures to promote reading culture and deepening education in Nigeria.

Nigeria’s military had advance warning of an attack on the town where some 270 girls were kidnapped but failed to act, Amnesty International says. The human rights group says it was told by credible sources that the military had more than four hours’ warning of the raid by Boko Haram militants.

Fifty-three of the girls escaped soon after being seized in Chibok on 14 April but more than 200 remain captive.

Nigeria’s president is vowing to find 276 schoolgirls abducted by Islamic terrorists and counter threats from militant group Boko Haram, as U.S. officials and agents arrived in Nigeria to assist in rescue efforts.

The kidnapping of more than 300 schoolgirls on April 15 in the town of Chibok has sparked accusations that the Nigerian government is not doing enough to stop the militants. While at least 53 of the girls—ranging in age from 16 to 18—escaped, the Nigerian government says 276 are still being held captive by the terrorists.

Crisis talks aimed at ending months of brutalities in South Sudan are set to open in Addis Ababa. It will be the first direct encounter between President Salva Kiir and rival Riek Machar since clashes began in December.

Since the Nigerian Islamic radical group Boko Haram kidnapped over 100 schoolgirls in mid-April, the media and the American government have been up in arms over this outrage. With over 200 girls in captivity, Boko Haram warned that they may sell the children into slavery.

Beginning the night of the kidnappings on April 16 and continuing ever since, the press has devoted relentless focus to the crisis in Nigeria. Nearly a block an hour on the three major cable news networks has been devoted raising awareness about the group, their medieval views, their aims, and the atrocities they have committed in the past.

Brazil produces most of the planet’s coffee. Amid a drought and a reduced supply, can humanity still get its fix?

In Brazil’s coffee community, people started whispering about a crise, a coffee crisis. Each year Brazil fills 55 million bags of coffee for the world. With January’s drought (which extended into February and then March), the number dropped by 20 percent. Brazil will be lucky to fill 45 million bags. A shortfall of ten million bags—each weighing 132 pounds—translates to around 42 billion cups of coffee that will never be brewed.

CARACAS, Venezuela — Hundreds of National Guard members and police broke up four camps maintained by student protesters and arrested 243 people in an early morning raid, Venezuelan officials said Thursday. The camps consisting of small tents were installed more than a month ago to protest against the government of President Nicolas Maduro.

A significant rise in passport fraud at Copenhagen Airport has led to politicians calling for more control in order to prohibit foreigners from entering Denmark using false documentation.

Peter Skaarup, the Dansk Folkeparti spokesperson on judicial matters, has contended that new passport scanners are required — an opinion that is shared by Trine Bramsen from the government coalition party, Socialdemokraterne.

A recent commentary by the superintendent of Eagle County schools asked Coloradans to “Embrace the Future” by changing from a mono-language society to a duo-language country. Additionally, the commentary addressed the current minority becoming the new majority. Additionally, if America continues on its current immigration path, we expect 100 million immigrants, their children and chain-migrated relatives within 36 years by 2050. (Sources: US Census Bureau, PEW Research Center, US Population Projections by Fogel/Martin)

As to turning ourselves into a multi-lingual society, former Governor Richard D. Lamm said in a speech in Washington, DC which I attended, “Here is how they destroyed their countries: first, turn America into a bilingual or multi lingual and bicultural country. History shows that no nation can survive the tension, conflict and antagonism of two or more competing languages and cultures. It is a blessing for an individual to be bilingual; however, it is a curse for a society to be bilingual. The historical scholar Seymour Lipset put it this way, “The histories of bilingual and bicultural societies that do not assimilate are histories of turmoil, tension and tragedy. Canada, Belgium, Malaysia, Lebanon — all face crises of national existence in which minorities press for autonomy, if not independence. Pakistan and Cyprus have divided. Nigeria suppressed an ethnic rebellion. France faces difficulties with Basques, Bretons and Corsicans.”

(ANSAmed) — ROME — A row between the anti-immigrant Northern League and the interior ministry erupted Wednesday as 1,000 migrants landed in Sicily, the largest recent ripple in a wave of arrivals that has surged since the deaths of 400 asylum seekers spurred a take-all-comers rescue operation last year. “Resign, you’re inept,” Northern League leader Matteo Salvini told Interior Minister Angelino Alfano. “Italy is suffering an unprecedented invasion and you’re not doing your job; resign for the sake of Italians,” Salvini said after visiting an overflowing migrant centre in Rome. The League leader said Italy needed a referendum to make entering Italy illegally a criminal offense again, as it was until a League-led law was repealed last year.

According to figures released by Defence Minister Roberta Pinotti Wednesday, almost 30,000 migrants have been rescued since the start of the Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) operation, launched last autumn. Most of them are from sub-Saharan Africa including war-torn countries like South Sudan, while an increasing number are from Syria and the Palestinian Territories. The interior ministry said last week that 800,000 asylum seekers were “poised” to set off for Europe from North Africa. People traffickers have been getting ever richer pickings from people who scrimp in slave or sex labour to pay their passage to a better life, observers say. The departures increased sharply after Libya collapsed into lawlessness following the fall of strongman Muammar Gheddafi.

(ANSAmed) — ROME, MAY 8 — Italian Police Chief Alessandro Pansa warned Thursday that the waves of migrant arrivals to Italy was increasing the threat of terrorist groups setting up bases. “Militants and potential militants of terrorist organisations can arrive in Europe along with the desperate people searching for bread,” said Pansa. “These organisations are involved in the trafficking of migrants”.

(ANSAmed) — ROME — There has been “shameful” criticism by anti-immigrant parties like the Northern League of Italy’s Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) search-and-rescue operation to avert migrant disasters in the Mediterranean, Premier Matteo Renzi said Friday. He said the op that picks up all comers off rickety boats sailing from North Africa had averted “100” possible recurrences of last year’s twin wrecks at the stepping-stone island of Lampedusa that took 400 lives.

A study published in PLOS Biology this week has quantified their dearth. Analysing 25 years of research in the evolution of genitals, the authors found a strong bias towards studying male animals — a disparity that has gotten worse, not better, over time. The bias, they say, is down to ingrained female stereotypes that lead researchers to see female genitalia as less important to evolution — something that, they argue, is hampering our understanding.

Hollywood and perhaps America may finally get it about what constitutes Sharia, Islamic law. This week liberals, feminists and the mainstream media figures are even publicizing it. That may be sucking the media oxygen from accusations of Islamophobia by Muslim advocacy groups like CAIR, Emerge USA, and United Voices for America. This was a perfect storm triggered by the conjunction of the Sultan of Brunei, who owns the Beverly Hills Hotel with Jay Leno, Ellen DeGeneres and mainstream feminists marching in outraged protests against Sharia at the fabled Hollywood Pink Palace. Couple this with the rising national outrage about 300 Nigerian girls abducted by Boko Haram and revelations that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton didn’t seize the opportunity to designate the Jihadist group as a terrorist organization when afforded an opportunity to do so. Especially since Boko Haram (“Non-Muslim Teaching Is Forbidden” in English when translated from the Hausa language) has allegedly raised funds here in the US. That was noted on last night’s FoxNews, The Kelly File by host Megyn Kelly with Brooke Goldstein of The Lawfare Project. See the You Tube video of that segment, here and this Fox News report, “Hillary Fought to keep Boko Haram off the Terrorist List”. The US has designated Boko Haram leader Abubakir Shekau a “global terrorist” and placed a $7 Million bounty on him…

A Satanic Black Mass reenactment is scheduled to take place at the Queen’s Head Pub in Memorial Hall at Harvard University on May 12, with the Mass performed by The Satanic Temple, which is being hosted for the event by the Harvard Extension Cultural Studies Club.

A non-consecrated communion host will be used in the reenactment, according to Lucien Greaves, spokesman for The Satanic Temple.

Home and Garden Television (HGTV) has just canceled one of their new do-it-yourself shows called Flip It Forward after its twin-brother hosts, Jason and David Benham, were outed as Christian conservatives who are against gay marriage and abortion.

The home renovation show focused on improving families’ houses had been scheduled to air in the network’s fall line-up, but after leftist media sources highlighted the hosts’ past opposition to abortion and gay marriage, the network immediately responded to the pressure by pulling the plug.

So what were the twin brothers’ great sins that got Right Wing Watch to publish an exposé denouncing them as “religious extremists?” Engaging in activism for their beliefs.

Hollywood is sick, sick, sick. Behind its curtain of holier-than-thou progressivism, the entertainment world’s top A-list stars have engaged in the most depraved sexual abuse against vulnerable children and teens, according to a growing number of victims. After years of cover-up, the institutional scandal is exploding. Finally.

The latest alleged atrocities involve “X-Men” director Bryan Singer and at least three other power players in the business: veteran television executive Garth Ancier, former Disney executive David Neuman and producer Gary Goddard. Last month, former child actor and model Michael Egan filed civil suits against the men, alleging that they passed around underage boys “like pieces of meat at sex parties” in the late 1990s. Egan’s X-rated lawsuit exposes a cabal of alleged predators who plied young boys and teens with hard drugs and alcohol before sexually assaulting them.

Egan was repeatedly molested, raped and beaten from the age of 15, he says, at an infamous gay sex mansion in southern California. The mansion was owned by another of Egan’s alleged abusers: scumbag Internet video mogul Marc Collins-Rector. He’s a registered sex offender who lured young boys online, drugged and raped them, and reportedly threatened them with a gun if they did not submit.

The feminists behind a proposed National Women’s History Museum on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. had scheduled a “lobby day” on May 8 to carry their campaign forward. But with the support of Republican House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA), a vote on the controversial proposal may be held as early as today, May 7, with plans to rush it through without public debate.

The urgency may stem from fears that the radical feminist orientation of the project may be exposed for the public to see.

For example, the museum’s online entry for communist feminist Bella Abzug, a former Democratic member of Congress, praises her for taking a stand against a “reactionary” part of American history.

“Specializing in labor and civil rights law,” it says of Abzug, “much of her work was pro bono defense of victims of this reactionary era” — the 1950s.

This is a reference, of course, to alleged “victims” of McCarthyism. It sounds heroic until you realize that Abzug’s FBI file disclosed her own involvement with the Communist Party, its front groups, and even Soviet officials.

The Center for Reproductive Rights, a non-governmental organization that advocates for legalized abortion, is urging the United Nations Committee Against Torture to tell the Catholic Church that “the freedom of speech and of religion” do not give the church the right to advocate against abortion.

In its pre-publication synopsis of the Lewinsky article, Vanity Fair reports that Lewinsky “requests one correction of Beyonce, regarding the lyrics to her recent hit ‘Partition.’ Lewinsky writes: “Thanks, Beyonce, but if we’re verbing, I think you meant ‘Bill Clinton’d all on my gown,’ not ‘Monica Lewinsky’d.’“

Such is the cultural trough where America now wallows. And Bill Clinton is one reason why.

Swedish men and women are as likely to be abused in an intimate relationship, a new benchmark report has found, but women are more often hospitalized after being assaulted by a partner.

Seven percent of men and seven percent of women who responded to a new Crime Prevention Council survey said they had been subjected to abuse in an intimate relationship, the term used in Swedish that corresponds to the English phrase “domestic violence”.

The survey asked about physical and mental violence, ranging from threats and degrading treatment to assault.

April saw Sweden’s Feminist Initiative (Fi) party add another percentage point to its voter support, edging closer to the parliamentary threshold just days after 52 percent of Swedes said they’d like to see the upstart party in government.

The report documents how people are more concerned with the things people say than the physical actions people take. Also, documented is how devil worshipers want a life sized Lucifer statue placed in Oklahoma.

What people say sparks more outrage than what people do, a startling trend in America that will chill all forms of free speech while also sending us into an intellectual dark age.

The sinister forms of thought suppression are escaping the pages of 1984 to sadly influence the world around us.

Just consider leftism-disgorged “hate-crime” law. It proves ever so explicitly that, somehow, liberals have discovered the utility of punishment; after all, they will justify this legislation by saying that since some crimes target whole communities, they’re so destructive that a message must be sent. It appears that when their own ideological ox is being gored, the people who authored the atheist version of “the Devil made him do it” want Devil’s Island.

A good example is Donald Sterling. It’s not enough that he has had his reputation destroyed, been fined $2.5 million and been “banned for life” by the National Bolsheviks Association. There are people who want newspapers to stop accepting his ads. And the bigoted Al Sharpton — proving hypocrisy knows no bounds — had actually said that the Clippers should be disbanded. Yes, and maybe we should adopt the North Korean model of purging Sterling’s family and friends, too. But how much punishment is enough? How many pounds of flesh will sate the rapacious and blood-stained leftist palate? Would only a gulag and a long, slow, painful death suffice for the world’s Sterlings?

None of this is a surprise if you understand that liberals don’t operate based on principles, but feelings; in keeping with this, liberalism isn’t an ideology. It is a process…

This governance by emotion helps explain why “*Some exceptions may apply.” It sheds light on why liberals haven’t made a federal case out of Bellville, NJ, Democrat mayoral candidate Marie Strumolo Burke, who lamented proposed tax-rate changes and was caught on audio exclaiming, “This is gonna be a f*****g n****r town!” It illuminates why they did nothing when then NBA owner Jay-Z threw a 2010 party in which no whites were allowed.

It is a cliché to say that East Asians think in terms of the group, while Westerners think in terms of the individual. But there is some truth to it, and part of the explanation may lie in what our ancestors ate. Rice farming seems to have fostered collective thinking while wheat farming favoured individualism.

The popular image of Americans and Europeans as individualist and innovative, versus Asians as collectivist and conforming, is partly true. People from the West and Far East can and do think in both ways, but these peoples’ cognitive styles divide broadly along those lines.

One thought on “Gates of Vienna News Feed 5/9/2014”

1. The Nakba, the celebration of a failed act of genocide by a bunch of anti semitic pyschpaths.
2.Raef Badawi to receive 1000 lashes for insulting islam. 1000 lashes? Isn’t that a death sentence? There are websites over here in Thailand that insult islam every 5 seconds or so. What do the saudis propose to do about that?
3 Sad to hear about Rashid Rehman in Multan. When I was there in 1995 this was a common occurrence against any lawyer who defended any Christian against trumped up blasphemy charges. World governments should stop giving their taxpayers money to Pakistan.